📚 Screenshots Marketing, Air Travel Design, Inbox Ten, Doc Web, Microwave Economy

One Million Checkboxes, Emotions in Inside Out 2 and more

Jul 22, 2024

Hi, this is post #168.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop felt like a warm hug on a winter evening. It felt like comfort food. Simple characters, plot and language, yet it was super enjoyable. There were no highs, no lows, nothing that was out of ordinary. Yet, this simplicity makes it an excellent read (or listen, as in my case).

I so want to visit the places described in the story. Some day!

Here’s what we’re covering today:

And now, onto today's finds…

📊 Building the Analytics Org

Jessica Lachs shares her lessons from building the analytics org at Doordash.

I found her inputs around breaking down the scope & accordingly building the solution highly useful. This simplified view of data discipline helps capture the spectrum of create, curate, consume fairly well.

She has inputs around how this can be served at every stage of an organization. These seem fairly intuitive and actionable. If you’re building or working closely with the analytics function, this document is a good primer.

And while you’re at it, do check out Julie Zhuo’s the Data-Informed Manifesto. As I had covered in #90, this manifesto is highly relevant for anyone delving in data backed decision making. Their articulation on ambition, ways of working & how to build the right culture for ‘data-centric’ decision making is simple and challenges many wrong notions that plague our analytics & data functions.

💬 Screenshots Marketing

Tom Orbach starts with this observation in “Screenshot marketing = the ultimate curiosity hook”.

I couldn’t agree more. We crave for things that are usually out of bound. Tell a kid to not touch something, and you know the next thing she will do. Access to private chat is one of those. There is guilt as well as excitement when we get a glimpse. And that’s what catches our attention time & again.

Tom has shared some examples. I can recall some that I had noticed on my Insta / Twitter feed.

Can you think of any? Did they really stop you & made you notice them, as Tom claimed?

✈️ Air Travel Design

If you care about customer experience, think about the design of public spaces, frequently travel by air or are curious about retail operations, I’ve got a new rabbit-hole for you - Air Travel Design Guide.

It’s created and maintained by folks at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Here’s how they describe this mega project:

The project is an analysis of the toolkit of tactics deployed by airports and airlines to guide passengers along. It catalogs a range of artifacts that passengers interact with during air travel: 1) documenting the design decisions embedded within them, 2) identifying their impact on passenger perception, and 3) speculating on alternative scenarios for design and passenger interaction.
Our goal is to facilitate a rethinking of how to design objects, spaces, and systems by putting the human experience at the forefront.
An important ambition of the guide is to improve understanding of the air travel passenger experience. It approaches this complex process through careful, focused study of the specific artifacts and processes that passengers engage with during air travel, using the resultant catalog of artifacts to document broad themes in the contemporary air travel experience and identify opportunities for design intervention embedded within.

Below are the kind of touch-points that are detailed out in three areas: design decisions, effect of passengers and what-ifs.

Fantastic food for thoughts, give a read to one page or two. A lot of new insights await you.

(via Arun Venkatesan, his newsletter always surfaces a gem or two like this.)

✉️ Inbox Ten

In “Inbox ten”, Boz (Andrew Bosworth, CTO Meta) talks about how do you stay informed and advance your own work while also keeping others informed so they can do the same?

He talks about building a system for managing your information. A couple of signs your system is working well (and tips on how to make it so):

If you do get information later than would have been useful, you debug what channel you weren’t in and amend your systems to prevent it from happening again.
If you have just consumed information that is noisy, figure out how to eliminate it from that channel in the future. Do this in real time as the action to be taken on that item. You can unsubscribe, set up inbox rules, or give feedback to the author.

He then goes on to talk in detail about his system. There are useful & actionable inputs, in case you are looking for some.

These ideas and techniques are simple, and are independent of tools. However, these can be effective only when you’re able to power them with your intention.

📃 The Doc Web

Elan Ullendorff’s “The Doc Web” is a fairly thought provoking read on the soft power of Google Doc publishing.

Here’s his premise:

‍Google Docs may wear the clothing of a tool, but their affordances teem over, making them so much more. After all, you're reading this doc right now, and as far as I know I'm not using a typewriter, and you're not looking over my shoulder. This doc is public, and so are countless others. These public docs are web pages, but only barely — difficult to find, not optimized for shareability, lacking prestige. But they form an impossibly large dark web, a web that is dark not as a result of overt obfuscation but because of a softer approach to publishing. I call this space the “Doc Web,” and these are its axioms.

He goes on to share 10 axioms to expand on his idea. I find this interesting as these arguments offered me newer ways to think about online publishing, creation, engagement & more. Sample this:

He has shared numerous google docs to showcase the versatility. Really fascinating.

Alex Komoroske’s “Bits and Bobs” newsletter and Rob Walker’s ICEBREAKERS are my favorite google docs. They are worth revisiting every now and then.

🍚 The Microwave Economy

David Perell’s “the microwave economy” offers many pearls of wisdom.

He suggests what’s wrong with the microwave meals. Answer lies in their inability to appreciate the beauty and craftsmanship that we had known.

This snippet points to the larger issue at hand:

As Mumford observed almost a century ago, the world loses its soul when we place too much weight on the ideal of total quantification. By doing so, we stop valuing what we know to be true, but can’t articulate. Rituals lose their significance, possessions lose their meaning, and things are valued only for their apparent utility.

We’re gravitated towards standardization for efficiency. However Perell warns of the consequences without mincing his words:

The tradeoffs of making the world more efficient are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken.

He used the example of ‘solitude’ to highlight the risk. This is an unusual example, albeit an effective one.

Finally, he shares an approach that he has used while furnishing his home (while avoiding the trap of microwave economy).

I loved this articulation. Fairly intuitive and gives a simple action plan. I hope I can stick with this one as I think of my choices in the coming months.

✅ One Million Checkboxes

One Million Checkboxes is a fun little game that Nolen Royalty released a couple of weeks back. You can check it out here.

As you will notice, the game is fairly simple. Is it even a game, you might wonder. And that’s ok. As NYT’s “Are you a checker or an unchecker?” shows, this became a large social experiment.

Sample this snippet from the article:

By providing a blank slate to users, One Million Checkboxes has also cycled rapidly through the stages of internet maturity, serving as something of a microcosm of the joys and horrors of digital life.
First there was a period of exploration, in which users worked together to check as many boxes as they could. Next came creativity, as some began filling in boxes to illustrate hearts or, in more cases, crude drawings of male genitalia.
Then things devolved, as they often do online, into all-out war.

Fascinating read! It reminded me of r/place that brings together people from across the world every year. Pudding had recently shared The Flipbook Experiment that entailed a similar collaboration element.

🍌 Three Million Bananas

The Paris Olympic is just around the corner. Sports & National pride aside, such events are massive infra and logistic projects as well. Eater did a story covering what the athletes will be eating there. A super interesting read, gives some glimpse around the complexity of such projects.

There are a few products we need to source internationally: coffee, chocolate, bananas. Bananas are an athlete’s favorite thing. We anticipate getting two or three million bananas. At peak time there will be 15,000 people living in one place. So that means per day, at peak time, we’re going to go up to 40,000 meals. At the end of the entire journey, it’s over 1.2 million meals. I was working on quantifying the volume of coffee, how to produce it. And then someone said, “Can we get the coffee grinds back to us to use as a fertilizer?” So what’s the volume of grinds we’ll produce? I’’s 20 tons of coffee, so that means it’ll be 40 tons of coffee residue. But all of this is going to be used to grow mushrooms.

(via Marginal REVOLUTION)

✨ Everything else

When the whole city is your canvas, folks like Artez and Alice Pasquini create magic. Their work has such universal appeal! (via DenseDiscovery, Colossal)
Robert Strati transforms shattered porcelain plates into 's delicate scenes. Imagination has no bound and artists can make anything a canvas. (via Colossal)
Finally, if you have not seen Inside Out 2, please go ahead and watch it. There has never been a better lesson in understanding your emotions. Check out this video (and shared links) to know more why this movie is so good. (via Colossal)