The Great Discontent is one of the best sites I’ve come across recently. It features weekly interviews with creative people, about “understanding the human side of creativity and our innate drive to create that keeps pulling us forward.” The interviews dive into the background of the interviewee and how they came to be where they are. Focusing more on questions like “are you satisfied creatively?” than “which tools do you use?”. The interviews are great, and the site is beautifully designed. It also has one of best responsive design implementations I’ve seen.

But the thing I like the most about The Great Discontent is that the site is the content. You go there and you’re immediately immersed in the interview. There is no blog-like list of recent interviews with a read more link, no carousel of “featured interviews”. There is just the interview with some minimal navigational elements. I love that. When I visit the site, I know if it’s a new interview, or one I’ve already read. It’s a deliberate decision to put the content first, and above all else. I think too many sites are afraid to be so bold.

This is the first a new series of posts I hope to do about things I like. As someone who spends all day creating things, I feel like I should spend a bit more time sharing and recognizing some of the things that inspire me.

I just submitted Flint 1.0 to the Mac App Store this morning. My goal was to finish it and submit by September 1st, 2011, and it took about 6 more weeks, which isn’t too bad all things considered. It was time well spent. I got more beta testers, added a few more nice features, and fixed a lot of bugs. But still, I had more that I wanted to do. I just kept thinking about adding one more little thing, one more tweak.

Whenever I’m at that stage of a product, I think of two quotes. The first is the famous quote by Steve Jobs, which conveys so much for being so succinct. In light of Steve’s recent passing, it takes on a new urgency for me to build and create and put things out there.

“Real artists ship.”
– Steve Jobs

The other that I always come back to is this tweet:

An engineer will endlessly tinker with a project as long as it’s sitting in front of them. Endlessly.

— rands (@rands) October 12, 2008

If I knew Rands personally, I would have thought he wrote it about me, as I’m particularly prone to that behavior. It’s never good enough for me, there is always more to do, more features to add, more bugs to fix, it will never be finished. So it’s a question I always have to ask myself while at the end of a product, am I improving or just tinkering? If I’m tinkering, it’s time to ship.

I think I should get posters of both of those quotes and hang them above my desk.

It’s easy to do too much with your app. Much easier than doing too little. It takes restraint and focus to pare down the features to just what the user needs to achieve their goal. If you’re not constantly mindful of this, you just starting throwing every feature you think a user might want, and the user experience suffers.

Here’s an example. There is a nice social network for reading called Goodreads. You can add books to read, see what your friends are reading, keep a history of books you’ve read, etc. I haven’t used it all that much, so I recently wanted to turn off my email notifications, and this is what I saw:

Good lord. I don’t know where to start on that, and that’s not even all of it. I’ve left out about 300 pixels at the bottom, and every settings tab has just about as much info. I just want to disable email alerts, I don’t want to spend all afternoon in there. The very least this screen could do would be a single checkbox that said “I’d like to receive email notifications”. That would have been fine with me. Maybe I would think I want some more options, but in reality, I’d much rather not have the choice. So many apps make things more complex than they need to be, because they think it’s what users want or need, but you can always get away with doing less.

For the last couple of apps I’ve made, I’ve been creating a sort of mind map to help me come up with the name. Finding a good name for an app is hard, but having a somewhat formal and repeatable process has made it much easier for me.

I say “sort of” mind map, because there aren’t really any strict rules I follow about organization/hierachy/line length/color/etc. It is more of a free association with a bit of structure. I write any words that come to mind, and connect them in whatever way makes sense. I try not to filter myself at all, because while I know I won’t use it as part of the app name, it may lead to something that will.

Here is an example of the map I created to name my most recent app, Flint, a Campfire client:

Excuse my sloppy writing, I usually create these fairly fast, and I’m the only one that ever needs to read them.

In this case, the words were anything related to camping, fire, or chatting. I could have taken it much further, but I found a few names I liked, and settled on Flint. Note, this is designed to create the kind of names I like for apps. Short, preferably one word, that has some connection to what the app does, however thin that connection is.

Toy Story, as we all know, was a huge hit. Only it was almost scrapped before ever seeing the light of day. Pixar had been trying to make the first, feature length computer animated film for years. They finally got the chance when Disney gave them the green light for Toy Story. The incredibly talented team worked on it for months, they showed it to Disney, and…it was terrible. It didn’t work, no one liked it, and the whole project was weeks away from termination. In this first version, the Woody we all know and love was, for lack of a better term, an asshole. He was an unsympathetic and unlikable character, and nobody could stand to watch him. After this crushing blow, the Pixar team basically rewrote the entire story in two weeks, and it still wasn’t great, but was good enough to continue production. They kept iterating during production and Toy Story become a phenomenal hit making over $350 million alone, not counting the sequels, and made Pixar a household name.

It’s easy to think that most master works and successful products are fully formed ideas in the minds of their creators, just waiting to be realized. But more often than not, as with Pixar, it takes a lot of work to get there. It’s not just the rare genius, but the 99% perspiration that makes something a success.

I highly recommend watching The Pixar Story, especially if you have Netflix, since it’s available to watch instantly. There is a lot of other great stuff in there that would be interesting to anyone in a creative field.