My brother, who lives near Atlanta (United States), visited an Apple store last week to check out some odd behavior with his MacBook. The technician noticed that his battery has physically expanded, and needed replacing. Seeing that my brother’s computer was covered by AppleCare, he said, “Hey, let’s take the opportunity to see whether anything else needs fixing/replacing, since your AppleCare expires next month.” As a result, my brother walked away with a new battery, trackpad, keyboard, and display.

This week, the SSD in my own MacBook died. I called Crucial Memory, in the United Kingdom, and within 15 minutes, they’d, without hesitation, shipped out a replacement drive under warranty, and provided me with a UPS account reference so that I could return the dead one to them, free of charge.

Let’s now compare these pleasant experiences in the US and UK, to customer service in Spain.

Earlier this week, I noticed that the battery in my MacBook had physically expanded (yes, it had ballooned in size), so that the MacBook’s battery cover was actually bulging outward. I took it to the local Apple store here in Marbella — Benotac — mentioned that the MacBook is covered by AppleCare, and ask if they could give me a replacement.

The store attendant made a call. Pay attention to the wording:

“I have a client here with a MacBook battery that’s physically deformed. Even though his MacBook is covered by AppleCare, replacement of a battery wouldn’t be covered, would it?”

That’s right, his default presumption is that, no, I’m not going to get a replacement.

After a few minutes on the phone, he returned to say:

“Ok, you need to bring in your battery and charger. We’ll send it to Malaga, run a test on the battery and your charger, which results in a code that will confirm whether or not we can replace the battery.”

So let’s think about what I’ve been told. Apparently, there exist the possibility that after testing, I’m going to be told that, my battery — which physically no longer fits in the machine — is fine and won’t be replaced.

Of course, I actually needed a battery on the spot, and mentioned this to the attendant, who stated that under no circumstances could they simply give me a replacement. I’d have to buy another one (which I did).

Looking on the bright side, he pointed out that, should they ultimately agree to replace my battery, at least I’d then have two. Lucky me.

Recently, some bureaucrats in Germany decided that business owners who employ contractors — even those, like me, who’ve been in business more than a decade — should provide certified proof that they (the owners) are not criminals.

So after spending 12€ in highway fees to travel to Málaga (the owner has to present himself personally) and paying 3.50€ in administrative fees (which must be hand-deposited at a bank, and paid no later than 10:30 am), and having lost three hours of my day this morning, I received a stamped certificate of clean record, from a disinterested and newspaper-reading Spanish bureaucrat, whose salary my taxes pay, which states that I’m not a criminal.

I will now spend 5.00€ to send the original document (a copy won’t do) via registered mail to another bureaucrat in Germany, who, after possibly glancing at it, will place it into a file, never to be looked at again.

Just ponder the waste of time and money, when this and similar, inefficiently facilitated — and, I would hazard to presume, generally unnecessary — bureaucratic procedures are multiplied by millions.

We are in the year 2010. Without leaving my desk, and within a period of about five minutes, I can login to AmazonGermany, place an order for a book to be delivered in Spain, and pay for it with an American credit card and billing address. You would think that if Germany needed to confirm that I’m not a criminal in Spain, they could (electronically) contact Spain and simply ask.

Consumers who use social networking sites may choose to share some information with others, but they still have a right to expect that their personal information will be kept private and secure.

If I, as a consumer, choose to create an account with a free social network service like Twitter, why am I entitled to anything beyond the terms of services to which I agreed?

It’s always difficult to tell potential customers that we simply don’t know how long it’s going to take to build a software system, if said system is moderately complex. This is one reason we avoid fixed-priced projects — when the cost of building something is unknown, you want to make sure both you and the customer are on the same side of the table. It’s also why the principle of building the simplest system possible is so important.

In the future, I’ll probably point people to this great article, Software is Hard.

In particular, I really enjoyed (and sympathized) with this part:

After a half-century of software scheduling, after counting function points and lines of code and switching from waterfall development to spiral to agile methods, the most effective scientific tools we have for estimating software development time are:

• The Ninety-Ninety Rule :  ”The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.”
• Hofstadter’s Law:  ”It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.

As well as this quote, from one of my heroes, Fred Brooks:

“The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.”

We decided to build the site on WordPress, and used its categories and keywords features to do some interesting things, while providing an easy-to-use interface — in Spanish — in which Javi and his manager can manage the content.

In order to leverage Javi’s preference to organize his photos in Google Picassa galleries, we created a WordPress post type called Media, which accepts an RSS-Feed keyword into which the RSS feed of a Picassa gallery (or Flickr set) can be entered. These posts then drive the Media section of the website.

We also created a WordPress post type called Events, including a set of custom keywords like “EventDate”, “EventLocation” and “EventResults”, which drive the “Events” section of the website, and which displays a small calendar on the home page. The home page calendar provides the visitor with a quick overview of Javi’s next upcoming event, as well as the last two events in which he participated.

As you can see in the image, we also added a little processing logic that grays out and strikes through past events.

We were able to design, implement and launch the entire site within about three days, and in practically no time had Javi’s team fully trained in its usage. For small projects like this, WordPress seems to be a great choice.

Be sure to visit the site, and let us know what you think about it.

JaviCarretero.com

Rules, there are three:

1. In order to qualify, tweet the following announcement message on Twitter:

   Be the first to find the Makalu Minimal Twist to win an iPod Shuffle. See http://bit.ly/c4j8SG for details. #makalutwist (via @makalumedia)

2. Check out the Makalu websites, and search for the Minimal Twist (you’ll know when you found it :)

   http://makalumedia.com

3. You must email me a description of the twist to matt (at) makalumedia (dot) com, with the subject, “I found the twist!” (Don’t publicly tweet the twist! :)

Good luck!

Matt (@mhenders)

Update.

Lots of good guesses, but nobody found it. The twist reveals itself after sending something via the contact form. :-)

Our small team at Makalu Interactive decided to give it a shot, and tweeted our interest just in time, on March 5th.

March 8th has since come and gone without any news from 37signals, and so it’s likely they’ve chosen someone else. That’s disappointing, of course, as we’re confident we’d have been a great choice. On the other hand, simply going for the project resulted in a surprising number of positive consequences, from which a few lessons can be learned.

A million and one excuses…

Since it launched, we’d been intending to establish a Pro listing at Sortfolio. It’s a well-designed service, and quickly established itself as the place to advertise your web design firm. But we hadn’t done so yet, because we first wanted to redesign our own corporate website at makalumedia.com (its previous design was probably three quarters of a decade old; prehistoric as internet time goes!) What good would it do to have a slick Sortfolio listing, if potential clients ultimately navigated to an archaic corporate site?

Turns out, we’d actually been thinking about redesigning makalumedia.com for the past three years, but hadn’t quite settled on how to proceed, since the company has evolved into two distinct businesses — aerospace (in Germany), and interactive products (in the USA).

It further turns out, that we’ve actually had an interactive design sitting on the shelf for the past half year, but hadn’t yet implemented it for lack of time due to client work, uncertainty on how best to integrate it into WordPress, and reservations about launching it alongside our existing site.

Dependencies. Procrastination. Uncertainty. Nothing getting done.

Get started now! (or, constraints are good.)

To bid on this project, we had to design and setup a Sortfolio presentation, and do it now, regardless of how our corporate site looked. Alex and I set aside a dedicated afternoon, turned off everything, and focused. The tight time constraint forced us to take decisions with little debate, and by 11 PM on Friday night we had our design online. It was “good enough.”

Later that evening, I got an alert from Chartbeat that makalumedia.com was seeing a whole lot of traffic. Checking Twitter, I got super excited to find that our Sortfolio entry had caught 37signals’s attention — and they liked it!

On Monday morning we thought, “Right. We have to launch a redesign of the Makalu Interactive site, and we have to do it now.” Again considering the time constraint, we settled on the idea of a simple, focused, one-page site. Alex hunkered down, repurposed our shelved design, and 24-hours later, Makalu Interactive was launched.

Another 24-hours later, another high traffic alert from Chartbeat. This time, however, it was because the new site had been “FAVd” at CSSMania.

All this activity caught the attention of our colleagues over at Makalu Aerospace (Germany), who of course demanded not to be left behind in aesthetic dust. So another focused burst of inspiration, and a similar one-page design was born.

(The new Aerospace site isn’t implemented yet, but check back on Monday, and you’ll likely find it is.)

Reflecting on all this…

Alex and I were reflecting on all this over coffee this morning.

Although we didn’t achieve what we set out to do — win the 37signal blog redesign project — it was obvious that going for it brought a lot of benefits, and uncovered some important lessons.

Working within constraints is good. The deadline of March 8 not only forced us into action, but forced us into a highly efficient and effective mode of work. To find time, we had to organize our client work with laser-like precision, so that it wouldn’t suffer as a consequence. To meet the bidding deadline, we had to collaborate and make pragmatic decisions. We had to accept “good enough,” which later proved to be “much better than we thought!”

Finally, achieving so much in such a short period of time created a renewed momentum of motivation and excitement that’s certainly going to benefit us going forward.

I was sitting in the ground station laboratory at the European Space Agency, needing to setup a test configuration using the “Monitoring & Control Module,” and staring at a grey screen full of mis-aligned, inconsistently-sized tabs on top of three-dimensional squares, on top of more squares on top of more tabs. The feeling was one of hopelessness and nausea. Who designed this thing? What were they thinking? Was the UI simply given to the most available “resource,” or perhaps the summer intern?

It was at that moment that I decided to start a company—MakaluMedia—in which “user experience” would drive everything we do. Understanding user experience in terms of user interface, interaction design and visual design, although challenging to articulate concisely, is still at least somewhat intuitive to most of us. Understanding and articulating it in terms of software engineering—which can be just as important to the overall experience of a software product—has always been (for me, at least) particularly challenging.

I read an article today, however, from Matt Gemmel, that really nails it. I’d recommend this as important reading for any teams and engineers involved in the creation of software products, and who care deeply about user experience.

http://mattgemmell.com/2010/03/09/engineer-thinking

I’ve emailed the photos to the company, asking if they consider this to be acceptable quality, and am waiting for a reply.