At 30 Boxes we recently passed our 6-month anniversary. Our business is rolling, but with other folks selling themselves on eBay, rampant speculation on true nature of Google, and our own series of forthcoming enhancements, we thought it opportune to dive into the nitty gritty of our philosophy and product strategy. A hat tip to Ed Yourdon, a prolific writer and IT veteran, whose recent comments inspired me to frame a discussion around the 30 Boxes approach to product development.

Let’s start with assumptions. We hold the folks at 37signals in high regard not only for their stellar products but also because of their commitment to challenging assumptions and ability to rethink solutions. We think more companies (big and small) should have this approach in their endeavors.

In the software industry, “the way things have always been done” is often an alluring road but it leads to a stifling of innovation. We believe that the tools used for personal organization (especially for the mainstream and younger demographic) are ripe for an overhaul. Here’s why…

MS Outlook - Market Leader

For businesses, the dominant software for personal organization is Microsoft Outlook. It is tried and true desktop software: built by an army of engineers, ported through countless OS upgrades, and complete in its approach to the problems it originally sought to solve.

Outlook is vulnerable to criticism on many fronts. Most glaring is a heavy-handed interface that is functional in the working world, but so unwieldy as to be often ignored as an organizational tool in the home. User interface critiques aside, though, there is something more fundamental looming. At a certain point, we believe that the consumer’s needs change so much that they invalidate the assumptions that were used to design the original product.

Such is the case with Outlook. Let’s look at the application’s foundations:

Email
Email as a monolithic communication platform is being derailed. Why? A new generation discovered spam-free platforms like IM (synchronous) in addition to subtle but truly visionary products like Brad Fitzpatrick’s LiveJournal where they could engage in asynchronous messaging in groups. Within these new applications was born a new notion of a “home page” anchored in presence and identity. If you don’t buy it and think that email is sufficient, ask yourself, what on earth people are doing on MySpace? Don’t get me wrong, email isn’t going to disappear. In fact, we think it is a key to identity. For communication and tasks, however, it will continue to decline as other avenues mature.

Contacts
The notion of an Outlook Contact is comprehensive but generally static and being outmoded. What is your ratio of email to snail mail? How often are you searching for a physical mailing address? People increasingly have many touch points; they hang out in different places online, and are tied together socially. Ultimately, the consumer needs to determine when, how, and where they want to be contacted. They also need to be free to build and control an identity online because personal organization is dependent on two-way communication for planning and decision-making.

Calendar
The Outlook Calendar is feature rich but unfortunately requires a fair amount of mental overhead. The thought and effort that goes into planning an event has been completed prior to the actual physical event of entering the data. Joe Consumer generally can’t tell you what is defective with software; if it works and is easy to use, then it is worth the effort. If it requires additional brainpower to enter data, then people will stick with something easier like a piece of paper.

Outlook Today
Let’s sidestep and recognize that as part of getting organized, individuals often turn to a portal. They too are struggling to measure up and consequently are being redone with better interfaces. The content is moving away from the generic as consumers are fast discovering the profound influence of user generated and user filtered content (digg, netscape, et. al.).

For planning purposes, and ultimately in general, what really matters to someone is what their friends are doing, sharing, saying, and filtering. This is Outlook’s biggest shortcoming: the social nature of our lives is largely ignored.

A New Approach

When we set out to build 30 Boxes it was with the initial impulse to allow easy visibility into shared schedules and to record a person’s timeline. The more we got into it, the more outmoded we found existing solutions. And so we set about to redo personal organization by challenging our own assumptions, rethinking and adapting user interfaces and maintaining a constant awareness of the social web.

30 Boxes is a work in progress. It is not designed for corporate use, nor did we ever believe that anyone chained to Outlook would entertain the thought of switching. It is suited to those people who have not yet formed strong organizational habits (generally under 25) and to those who have not tried organizing with a computer (mom and dad). It also happens to work well for small nimble businesses that want a painless way to share schedules.

Answering the question “what am I doing today?” generally involves some research, discussion, planning, reviewing, and then doing. We see three primary modes for this process: analog (old), digital (current, especially in the workplace), and social (emerging). The analog mode involves a lot of active verbal communication with scheduling and organization on paper. The emphasis is on the future.

In the digital mode, many people in the work place attempt to organize with the help of a “productivity suite” which is tied to the desktop. Planning becomes driven by the primary interface (email) and is heavily task centric. The dearth of sharing options creates an acute division between home/work activities. David Allen has explored the impact of “knowledge work” and the new emphasis on efficiency and the ability to determine what can be done at the moment. The focus on immediacy, however, causes a major pain point because planning can’t happen in a vacuum–it requires interaction with others.

We are all social to some extent (at home and at work) and these interactions set the boundaries on our ability to organize and plan. The emergence of passive communication through shared media holds the promise of making our lives more productive, more informed, more serendipitous, and dare we say, fun! With non-obtrusive ways to ascertain information, the critical question, “what are my friends (co-workers, family, etc.) doing?” can obtain a loftier standing in our organizational scheme.

Here’s the catch, managing all of these inputs and outputs becomes a challenge. In order to easily navigate all of this information, the software requires a fresh architecture and design.

The Timeline View

With 30 Boxes, our critical shift has been to move from the dominant interface of email to a timeline view, which we believe is a more intuitive starting place for organizing your life. It is a calendar and useful for calendaring, but it includes all manner of date stamped social media, is largely agnostic (you can use Google Calendar or Upcoming.org as your primary vehicle to schedule), and was designed with sharing and information management in mind. It is dynamic (updating with your friends’ events), intelligent, available (lives on the web), open (your data is available in any fashion), and flexible.

Don Dodge has been quite vocal that calendars are not a business (don’t tell FranklinCovey). We generally agree, and when it comes to personal organization there are quite a few components that are required. In fact, 30 Boxes has (or is near having) analogous components to MS Office.

Supporting Characters with New Names

In addition to shifting the primary UI away from email toward a calendar/timeline view, we have been taking a new approach to the others as well. For email, we have a forthcoming application called Supermail, so named because it sits above and tries to govern multiple inputs/outputs as well as the non-email communication generated from social networks and blogs. It will also attempt to patch the reliability issues with standard email delivery and it will (of course) have an emphasis on sharing.

In our world, contacts are now Buddies that support multiple contact points and virtual locales. We are very much engaged in identity management, social reputation, and portability. In order to make passive communication possible, you need aggregation tools that make it easy for the masses. When someone joins 30 Boxes, we roundup their online persona and immediately make that easy to share, easy to syndicate, and easy to duplicate.

What about the old-fashioned portal? With a social foundation, suddenly a “starting point” becomes a lot easier. When your circle of friends and family are doing and sharing things, information that is highly relevant to you is now readily available. Where the old portal shows you your horoscope, the new one might tell you that your good friend is planning to attend a concert next weekend or that your mother-in-law’s birthday is tomorrow! In a work setting you might know who is in or out of the office (increasingly in real time — with not only calendar data but services like AIM presence notification or SMS offerings like twitter?) The impulse for our Webtop was to design a starting point that was free of random noise. Bookmarks, search box, and most importantly, Buddy Updates in the last 24 hours. The rest (like your desktop) is up to you. Make the background pretty, add an icon or two to websites that are really important to you. If you need an information fix, then by all means, inline an old (or new Web2.0) portal.

Work In Progress

We have achieved a lot in the last 6 months, but there is much more to come. We hope to end our beta in early November but for now, every day we ask, “how can we make 30 Boxes more intuitive, more open, and more compatible?” Thanks to the advent of the social web, our ability to organize our day-to-day stuff is being dramatically altered. It is becoming more comprehensive, more efficient, and we hope, easier.

Tags: socialweb, web2.0, outlook, dondodge, 37signals, identitymanagement, webtop, supermail, edyourdon, gtd

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Corporate News, Product News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.