HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

They could even be adventurous and offer multiple downloads with different extension bundles. These would be easy to implement; because extension bundling already exists as "collections"[1]. Something like:

- Standard Firefox with our officially recommended extension. (use for the front-page/default download)

- Minimal Firefox without any extensions or other optional features. ("Try this on older/slower computers")

- Developer Starter Kit with a selection of extensions related to web development.

- Social Media Special with more extensions like Pocket plus quality-of-life features for people that spend z lot of time on Facebook/etc.

Having a variety of options is important, because there isn't a universal spaghetti sauce[2].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/

[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...

10 BY 10, going purely by your description, makes it sound to me along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell's pasta sauce realization[0]--if you want to find the perfect sauce for person X, you need to offer chunky, spicy, and "plain". None is inherently the best, so you offer three that are best in distinct ways.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...

⬐ robinjfisher

I'm not familiar with the video and will check it out when I'm at home.

If I was to say more on 10 BY 10 it's that I don't see the differentiator. Plenty of search firms are staffed by people with domain knowledge and the pre-screening of resumes by an expert or qualifying candidate interest prior to resume submission are not significant enough to differentiate in that space.

If I was to be cynical, I'd say that going through YC gives them access to a lot of prospective clients because I fail to see why any particular significant investment would be needed to start a search firm.

I see the TC article talks about a marketplace so perhaps there is a development down the line of what their solution looks like.

> School choice means competition among schools. Which leads to winner and losers.

This doesn't follow at all. Consider e.g. a company that sells different flavors of spaghetti sauce (https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...). The flavors are competing, but only on a per-person basis; overall the flavors are optimized to satisfy everyone's (different) preferences.

It's quite easy to imagine a similar concept in education, where people learn better from a particular teaching style or are better served by a particular curriculum. There's no obvious reason to expect that one "good" school would be sufficient for everyone's needs; the ideal situation would instead be that one could choose from several schools, of which at least one is "good".

⬐ tehabe

But spaghetti sauce can be switched for your next meal if it taste bad. A school not so much, if attended a bad school for a while you might not be able to catch up on a good school, or you have to start over again, or they don't even let you into the better school.

I remember the case of private school in Germany, which failed to prepare their pupils for the final exam of the state and all students failed. After that it turned out their curriculum was wrong. The pupils paid the price for the failure of the school. The school closed and the pupils had to repeat the year.

⬐ unescape

People switch schools all the time. It's a non-argument. This is like saying, what if you eat bad spaghetti sauce once, and then your taste is ruined and you can never enjoy good spaghetti sauce again? Guess we better end spaghetti sauce choice, can't risk it.

This is the wrong way to think about it. It's not what you pay for because almost nobody is actually making a choice to pay for it.

It's what they think you want. They're all trying to sell what they believe has the broadest appeal which happens to be vapid, emotionally charged shit. The thing is, when everyone is selling the most broadly appealing product, the whole market consumes less.[1]

I personally consume very little because it has such little value to me. There are quite a few like me for various reasons.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...

Hi OP here, thank you for your opinions. I just wanted to say that I thought that I had "thought it through" but apparently I didn't, it was more complicated than I thought it was. This is not the first time in my life that I thought I had thought something through, there have been numerous times actually in all aspects of my life. A year or so ago, I watched a Malcolm Gladwell talk on TED (http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce) where spaghetti sauce companies thought they had thought things through, but really didn't it. Of course I could have spend lots of time reading books, but even then I might have missed this. I just wanted to share my experience and ask for any advice (not legal) just advice/tips in general from others who had been in the same boat. So far the comments have been excellent and invaluable. They have taught me many things I didn't think of before, but more importantly it will help others who might be looking or are doing that same thing I was doing already on my side project.

Yeah, this is what you get if you use metrics to find a "common ground of preference". But this is the primitive way of doing it. We already know the better way to do this, thanks to things like Howard Moskowitz's research and all the work done afterwards (http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce).

But nobody has successfully applied this to commercial UI/X design yet. Maybe because people are not sophisticated enough to appreciate choice when it comes to apps/websites. Or maybe because they are so overloaded that making them make any choice actually scares them away and drops the retention/click-through/interaction/etc. numbers. Then again, if would work, the company successfully using this would get a monopoly in their field instead of naturally sharing the user base with other competitors simply because the users don't all like the same things. I kind of like the idea of having 4 different tomato sauces made by 4 different producers, the "letting the market solve the problem" way, so I'm secretly glad the "better way of doing UX/I by numbers" hasn't been well applied in software :)

Relevant:

Malcolm Gladwell: Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...

I think this is what Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his TED talk about the best spaghetti sauce - http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...

I think having just 1 final formula will be a mistake. Different people have different needs. I remember reading somewhere on his site that women testers complained of hunger, for example. Activity levels and age may cause different needs as well.

It's a bit of this TED talk about having alternative recipes because there's rarely one ultimate recipe that everyone likes. Some people like smooth peanut butter, others like crunchy, etc. http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...

⬐ silencio

It worried me to read that most of the customers are men (young at that too, along with all the founders), since the other half of the population of Earth have differing nutritional needs. I'm kind of afraid that not enough testers are women or from different walks of life than your average hacker, too.

I used to be iron deficiency anemic for the longest time and general multivitamins didn't even come close to addressing the iron deficiency. It's no longer a problem but I still tend to buy products like vitamins only for women now as a result.

Mr Curtis could do worse than watching Gladwell's Ted Talk from a few years back:

http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...

tl;dr when one asks a question involving people, and you want the most fitted data, then you need to consider grouping/segmentation of the population into clusters of preference.

What is the best spaghetti sauce?

It's a flawed question, as it contains an invalid assumption.

Thus what Curtis seems to be describing is a (great/awesome/very good) etc set of knives, but not 'the best'.

Very good = a maximization of universal requirements

Best = maximization of universal && local requirements (population segmentation preferences, spacial and temporal context etc)

Example: Those forks may be best for Curtis at his dinner. They are certainly not best for me, on my camping trip. Or best for a tribe in Africa with different shaped mouths and habits etc. Or best for someone eating Chinese takeout. etc

⬐ jfb

"Different shaped mouths"?

⬐ esolyt

Not necessarily different shaped mouths, but there are different ways of eating and different ways of using a fork depending on your sex, hand size, culture, daily caloric intake etc.

You can't make "the best fork" unless you also want to enforce your way of eating upon people who are going to use your fork. You can, however, try to make the best fork for the largest group of people and get people to become loyal to your brand. After they become loyal to you, you will feel more and more power to enforce your ways of doing things and as a result your products will get "even better" in their eyes. This is what most companies are trying. But only Apple is exceptionally good at this. Hence, I think this whole article serves the purpose of subconsciously justifying the author's brand loyalty to Apple.

⬐ wamatt

Haha now that you mention it, that does sound a bit odd! :)

While it was just an example.. perhaps though, it's possible for there to be morphological oral differences.

Similar to that which exists in other parts of the body, such as facial structure, eyes, noses etc

⬐ jfb

Yeah, I think it's totally a thing, it just sounded really strange.

⬐ plaguuuuuu

Singer from Aerosmith. He has a HUGE mouth.

⬐ georgemcbay

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip_plate

I guess the original poster you're responding to wasn't talking about that since he didn't mention it in his followup to you, but I assumed that was what he was talking about when I first read his post and it didn't seem so weird to me.

I mean... lip plating seems weird to me, but the idea that some people in some tribes in Africa have different shaped mouths didn't seem weird.

⬐ kooshball

> Example: Those forks may be best for Curtis at his dinner. They are certainly not best for me, on my camping trip. Or best for a tribe in Africa with different shaped mouths and habits etc. Or best for someone eating Chinese takeout. etc

Did you really read that article and understood it as Curtis saying the set of flatware he bought is the best in the world?

⬐ benatkin

Is there an interesting article by someone who did real research in this area? I'd rather not support Gladwell.

⬐ baddox

> Those forks may be best for Curtis at his dinner.

Yeah, I think that's the point, since he's the author. Or are we still writing middle school essays where we have to explicitly put "I think" in front of every subjective sentence?

⬐ wamatt

>I think that's the point, since he's the author

Well I could be wrong, but I assume he was trying to make a broader point than "Hey everybody, these Yanagi forks are best for me".

I'd also imagine discussing any individuals particular preference for some random product, is of little concern to HN.

Without getting into the materialism debate or Curtis's obvious aestheticism bias, I thought some might be interesting in a discussion about

"What does 'the best' actually mean?"

My bias, would that I'm thinking about the question mostly from the perspective of businesses wishing to supply products or services to consumers.

⬐ catshirt

you're right, the broader point is "buy what is the best [for you]". i assumed the "for you" is implicit, given the obvious subjective nature of what it is we're talking about.

are you suggesting he's trying to imply that there is a canonical "the best" of everything?

⬐ fudged71

Regardless, he could be more explicit about this point in his post.

⬐ catshirt

likewise, the hn crowd could stand to try reading between the lines instead of arguing tangentially

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I myself rely on RL friends, which is quite similar to what your proposed solution is actually doing :).

(My friend used to work in the food/restaurant business and had hundreds of restaurants in the area as customers, plus I've known him for 15+ years now so he is an ideal guy to ask for recommendations for me)

I'll also point you to Gladwell's TED talk on the same subject. He's a wonderful storyteller with a very distinct style: http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...

Maybe someday I'll get around to expressing this idea in a more refined blog post, but here is the rough thinking for now...

Irrespective of whether one approaches UX using intuition/experience, or statistical methods, both tend to incur a flawed assumption: There is a single 'best' version of a product/app/website, in terms of the overall UX decision.

Consider AB testing, where x measures some objective result:

f(A) = x

f(B) = 3x

So the results show f(B) > f(A). As an example, in context this could mean site version B, retains visitors longer and results in higher conversions. Therefore, UX version B 'wins' right?

What's the problem here? Perhaps it should rather look like this:

f(A,B,C) = [Ax,By,Cz]

Forgive me if the notation is a bit unusual, but the idea is you end up with 3 different UX's. 3 'best' versions of the website, that are always live, simultaneously. Or if you had a bimodal preference group, you would end up designing 2 UX trees. The number of clusters or 'groups' does not matter, only the fact that clusters exist to begin with.

We need to move away from the idea there is a single 'best' version of an interface. More often than not preferences when batched together (in the form of a product, app or whatever), do not form a neat normal distribution, even if approximating that is convenient.

A/B testing so highly regarded because it works. As effective as it is, (if used right), I believe we can do better.

Malcolm Gladwell eloquently expands on this concept, using an example from the spaghetti sauce industry, with further detail. I strongly encourage you to check it out, if you haven't yet, it's awesome![1]

This same idea of clusters applies for taste in movies,books,foods, which faces we find beautiful and almost anything really when looking at a population. Taste in website UX preferences is no different.

So the optimal webapp of 2020, is one that automatically knows which clustering a visitor falls into and presents a version of the site that makes them most comfortable, based upon UX decisions that align well to his/her group.

The current approach in software tries to shoot for a middle ground compromise, and in addition using a settings or preferences panel that the user needs to tweak. This could be considered suboptimal as more effort is required from users.

Example: There is a reason that UI animation annoys me (and others), to the point I'm willing spend hours researching how to hack the O/S, in order to turn it off. Clearly however, there exists other groups for whom it looks good, and there is no issue.

Why these clusters/groupings exist at all could be a combination of differences in our neurocognitive functions, and the summation of experiences over our lifespans.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...