Hello again and welcome to this third and final installment of obfuscation in the name of clarity (for now anyways). I wanted to get away a bit from discussion of using technology and focus more on how some of those ideas impact the way we are approaching the design of Less Annoying Software. So here goes.
Energetics, Kinetics, and Software Design
A brief foray into
basic chemical reaction theory. Let's say you want to understand
whether a particular reaction is going to occur (e.g. whether two
molecules will bond together to become one). There are generally two
dimensions that one focuses on to understand this reaction:
- Is the ending state more favorable than the starting state (energetics/thermodynamics)
- How difficult is it to transition from the starting state to the ending state (kinetics)
Often
times when thinking about such things, the first dimension is the
primary focus: if the end state is energetically favored, it will
eventually win out. However, there are plenty of cases where the
kinetic picture (i.e. how difficult the transition is) is crucially
important. The classic example of this is diamonds. Despite their
"forever" label, diamonds are energetically unstable. It is extremely
difficult, however, for the atoms that make up diamonds to rearrange
into the more stable (and decidedly less precious) state.
Software
design can be thought about in very similar terms. As Tyler has talked
about, Less Annoying Software is a customer manageer that helps
organize lots of information about your customers, and, among other
things, provides an easy way to survey the state of all your sales
leads. For many people who currently use some combination of Outlook,
Excel, and a to-do list, we believe that even in it's current young
state this tool can be a dramatic improvement to their work flow.
That's basically an energetic argument (the first bullet above). As
soon as we believed that our software would be useful for some people
over what they currently do, we decided to release. We were already one
up on diamonds.
While we are still heavily developing and
enhancing the core functionality of Less Annoying Software (improving
the energetics), we have also of late taken a decided turn towards
improving the kinetics. A certain amount of this is marketing: among
the biggest barriers to people using our software is their learning
about it. I'll probably have some posts about how we're approaching
this side of things at a later point, but for now, I'll just say that
it's definitely a current focus. Other types of kinetic optimization,
however, have come in the form of changes to the software and the site.
As I said, as soon as we thought we could make an energetic argument in
favor of LAS, we decided to release. The last feature that we added
before release, however, was the ability to import contacts from
Outlook or other contact managers: a decidedly kinetic feature.
Importing contacts doesn't really add any functionality after you've
been using LAS for a few months. As such, contact importing isn't what
I would call part of the core software. It is however, extremely
important, I believe to make the transition to LAS easier. Right now
we're pushing LAS forward on all fronts, but keeping in mind which
features affect the long term versus the entrance path (and which needs
more optimization) will ultimately help shape the course of development.
