You can see my entire post on the new design on the Formspring Blog. 
Formspring got a facelift!
June 3rd, 2010Zoosk Girl – The Music Video
April 29th, 2010I know I posted the mp3 earlier, but this time there’s a music video (featuring a lot of my design work) 
Ask Me Anything
April 21st, 2010About two weeks ago I made it official: I’m joining Formspring.me as Lead Designer. I’m super excited about the opportunity to work on a young product with such potential social impact. I literally can’t stop having ideas for how to enhance the user experience.
Unfortunately, this also means that I’m leaving an amazing group of people at Zoosk, who’ve made the last two years an incredible ride:
Shayan is easily one of the best CEOs I’ve ever worked with. Even when he has back-to-back meetings all day, he somehow still finds time to walk the dev pool and help out. His responses and design reviews are always open and thoughtful, and taught me a lot about how to evaluate my own work.
Alex, co-CEO and resident cardboard tube samurai, can eat a giant gummi bear in one sitting (“It’s good for you,” he’d say). He can also make Google Analytics tell you its deepest darkest secrets.
John always pushed me to think harder and longer about design and user experience. Always ready with more questions than any normal person should have, he always thinks bigger and better.
Jeff went from working on Zoosk.com to teaching himself Flex and writing an entire chat client. He also has better hue-recognition than I do.
A man of few words, Brad is great at internalizing a problem and coming out with a great solution on the other side. I You’ll find him at Mission Cliffs or Planet Granite climbing V10s and such (spoiler alert: I think he’s Spiderman).
Of course, these aren’t he only people who I’ve worked with over the past two years. When I started, there were only six people at Zoosk (seen above), including myself. When I left, I’m pretty sure we had over fifty, with each person as quality as the last. There isn’t one person at Zoosk who I wouldn’t love to work with again. From rooftop keggers to boat parties to having a song written about Zoosk by T-Pain and Flo-Rida, it’s been one of the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had. Thanks to everyone at Zoosk for making the last two years so memorable.
Zoosk Girl
March 27th, 2010I’ll be making a couple of posts in the next few days about Rework and the DnD game we just started, but I have to share this first.
Flo-Rida and T-Pain (whose last single, Low, is apparently the most downloaded track ever) have collaborated again and written a song about Zoosk! It’s only playing on the radio right now, but I found a streaming version for you to check out. Pretty.freakin.awesome:
Powering Facebook with Bicycles
February 10th, 2010Today, I was talking with one of our developers about the barriers to starting your own social network (Ning, not withstanding). After a little back and forth, he said that, of all the barriers, pure energy costs of running and maintaining servers would be the toughest to crack. My response was that we could probably just hire a bunch of people to ride bicycles and power the servers at a much cheaper cost. Almost inevitably, this led us to wonder how many bicycles it would take to power Facebook’s servers. I sat down with our SysAdmin and did a little rough math to figure it out:
First of all, we needed to know how many watts single person can generate on a bicycle. A quick Google search led us to believe that the average adult can generate between 75 and 400 watts. For the sake of simplicity, we used an average value of around 200 watts per person.
Next up: Watts per server. Luckily, we could just use the value from our own servers: approximately 400 watts. This means you’d need 2 bicycles for every server.
We guesstimated that Facebook has approximately 40,000 servers (someone feel free to give me the real number). At 2 bikes per server, you’d have to station 80,000 bicycles in your server facility. That’s a lot of bikes!
But then there are the people. Assuming 8-hours of activity per shift (broken up so that each person could have rests, Facebook aren’t slave drivers, after all), and the constant need for energy, you’d need 240,000 people to power Facebook 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This number goes up even more if you allow for more breaks/shorter shifts/weekends off/vacation time/etc.
Next time you think your job sucks, think about how you could be doing this instead:
Original photo by xtracycle
Current and Upcoming Book Updates
January 13th, 2010I’m about a quarter of the way through Journey to the End of the Night
Which leads me to February’s book, which I just ordered today:
Figured I could use some #nerdcred.
Book, the First: Journey to the End of the Night
January 7th, 2010While I haven’t finished compiling the list of the books for the year, I did manage to select the first one and order it on Amazon. It arrived a couple days ago and I’m starting it today:
Journey to the End of the Night
I’ll be writing little updates about the book as I read it. Feel free to read along!
Ohlone Dog Park (with Photos)
January 2nd, 2010Took Carver Watanabe and his dog-friend, Ursula, to Berkeley today to play at Ohlone Dog Park. It’s an amazing fenced in area where dogs can roam free and humans can sit and talk on picnic tables. I took my D40 out with me (which I have recently begun to use with more frequency) and took some of the best photos I’ve ever managed. Days like today are what encourage me to learn more about my camera and photography in general.
The entire set is up on my Flickr profile. Here are a few of my favorites:
What do you think?
Wanted: Twelve Books for the New Year
December 30th, 2009
Generally I’m against New Year’s Resolutions. They’re all-too-often vague and, as a result, impossible to take direct action on. Still, I can’t help but reflect on stuff I wish I’d done better or that I wish I’d done at all over the past year. To try and resolve all my shortcomings would be a nearly insurmountable task, so I’ve decided to just focus on one thing over the next year:
Read more books.
I used to read every day. A year and a half ago, you could’ve asked what I’d read lately and get a laundry list of titles that I was in the middle of devouring. But life is more hectic now and the odds of me keeping more than one book going at a time are slim. But I know I can, at the very least, commit to one book per month. Not a lofty goal, to be sure, but a solid, achievable one. The problem is I have no clue what books I want to read. This is where you come in.
Suggest books to me. You can comment on this post, email me (cwatkins at gmail dot com), IM me (capstinence on AIM), @reply me or DM me.
Feel free to suggest anything you want: Fiction or Non-Fiction. In a few days, I’ll pick (as randomly as I can) twelve books to commit to for the next year and post the order of them as soon as the list is ready, so anyone who wants can read along as well. Each month I’ll write a report on the book I read and let you know whether or not I’d recommend the book to anyone else and why.
Thanks in advance for helping me out I’ll be sure to also post the full list of everyone’s suggestions.
What YouTube should do with all that great user research
October 6th, 2009Interesting article on YouTube’s blog yesterday regarding their User Research discoveries. They gave users a set of magnets which represented different features and elements of YouTube (as well as other video sites) and asked them to arrange their ideal version of the YouTube video page:
From YouTube’s blog:
One of the most important findings has to do with the difference between the large group of users who are on YouTube simply to watch videos and a smaller, but very important, group of more engaged users — often uploaders. The latter group will, unsurprisingly, care about details like how to make communication with their audience easier and more effective, how to grow their audience, and even how to make money on YouTube. The former, on the other hand, want as simple of an interface as possible: “Just let me watch the video, please!”
Now the question is how to design for these use cases. The ideal solution, to me, starts with the simplest design possible, with the ability to dig deeper to more advanced features if you desire. Of course power users want every feature on one page… they use them all! And it’s important when you’re designing to make sure that all those features are:
a) Easily accessible – Make power users dig for advanced features, but make the layers shallow. In other words, advanced features should be a click or two (maximum) away from the video page.
and
b) Usable – A shallow, accessible navigation doesn’t mean that the features should be. Reward your advanced users for their effort with well thought out, usable features. It’s a big mistake to assume that your power users have any desire to deal with convoluted, unnecessarily complex features. Make it as simple as it can be, while also offering a rich user experience. It’s a tightrope walk, for sure, but something that can definitely be accomplished.
To me, all of this means going with the simpler, video-centric design, while implementing new tools and a more intuitive interface which surfaces those tools, so that your power users feel more empowered while your normal users don’t feel overwhelmed or distracted from their goals. Now that I’m talking about it, I somewhat tempted to mockup a scenario. I’ll post it here if I do