Redesigning A User Interface In The Open

Bugideohiro
Last month I posted that our portfolio company Boxee (featured in the NY Times today) had hired Whitney Hess to help rethink the user interface and I asked everyone to go give them and her comments on what could use improvement. That was a good example of using the community and being open and receptive to feedback to improve the user experience.

But yesterday, our portfolio company Bug Labs went one step further. They’ve hired the well known design firm IDEO to help them redesign the hardware UI for the BUGbase (the front panel comprising LCD, joystick and four hotkeys).

And they’ve convinced IDEO to do the whole redesign process out in the open. So they’ll be blogging and talking to the community about the whole process over the next two weeks. You can participate in the design process via the Bug Blog, Bug Community, and the IDEO blog.

If you have a BUG, want a BUG, or are interested in the open source hardware movement and have ideas about how to make the BUGbase better, please click thru to one of those pages and let them know what you think.

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#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. Scobleizer

    This is HUGE. This is EXACTLY what I was asking for back in 2004 when I wrote a letter to Bill Gates. Everyone called me an idiot back then. But Bug just did it! http://radio.weblogs.com/00

    1. fredwilson

      you wrote that while you were at Microsoft, right? that’s pretty greatpls blog about this Robert, because the more people they get involved the better

  2. Rik Wuts

    Wowsa, good call! I hope ideo will be equally open about the evaluation of this process, lots to be learned from this!

  3. Michael Broukhim

    There just isn’t an awful lot of transparency in product design processes… this is a great step by Bug Labs, and I’ll be curious to see how it plays out for them.Some things I’ll be watching for:* how will they handle turning away an overabundance of good ideas and prioritizing amongst them… ‘transparent’ is different than ‘democratic,’ and it’ll be interesting to see at what points IDEO draws lines* how will the community react if for one reason or another IDEO disagrees with some consensus – after all, experts may end up rightly disagreeing with the crowd* It’ll also be interesting to get a retrospective from them in the end to see how closely the ultimate product design they reach will match what their initial conception was – how much the crowd actually changed their minds.Cool story…

  4. Mats

    Great consumer electronics products are usually *not* the result of a democratic process but rather the singular vision of one or a few people e.g. jobs & apple, slingbox & krikorian brothers. The same is often true for software as well. So while I think transparency is good here, I am not sure that a process that takes 1000s of people’s input will lead to a better buglabs product. Also is buglabs really hoping that people will actually turn the modules themselves into end-products. It seems like those products are always going to be bigger and clunkier than a single purpose built design. I thought buglabs business model was to create an easy prototyping environment and charge for the software. So why spend a bunch of money on the design on the hardware prototyping? Not sure I get it but I could be confused about the business model.

  5. Facebook User

    I’m sure I’m not the first one to bring this up, but everytime I play around with Boxee I end up thinking that it should be sold in the Wii online store. I think a Wii-mote peripheral would be a great way to get Boxee’s custom hardware out to millions of households without necessitating the purchase of a Mac Mini / Apple TV.

    1. fredwilson

      it would be great if nintendo allowed boxee to do an install on the wii

  6. karllong

    what a great story, I love the idea of opening up the design process. IDEO has always been pretty forward thinking about involving users in the design. That being said I’m rather surprised they went with IDEO though, apart from the price, I just see them as the product design experts and less experienced designing ‘social products’ or ‘social services’. IDEO has brilliant industrial design chops, but I think Bug Labs could benefit more from ‘service design’ or ‘social design strategy’. Maybe this will be IDEO’s learning experience in the socializing of products and opening up of the participatory design process.

  7. fredwilson

    Great stuff Jake. I wholly endorse your rant and your ideas. Yes, our firminvested in BUG to make money at some point, but we are a long way away fromthat point. Right now we just want to see them make something people want tohack on. And honestly, that¹s what Peter and the BUG team want too. You makea lot of great points and I¹ll make sure Peter and the BUG team see this.ThanksFred

    1. Peter Semmelhack

      I agree with Fred – great stuff and thanks for taking the time write it all down. I wish all our customers gave us such candid feedback. Let me address your points one at a time.Re: comment moderation at IDEO – there is not supposed to be any. I’ve pinged the folks there to make sure that’s the case. Please feel free to post your comments on our blog too – http://community.buglabs.net. WIth your permission I’d be happy to cut and paste them over there too. Everyone should get the benefit of your insights – positive or negative. We absolutely want to hear everything.Re: Digging… Your points on less marketing and more “ideas and source code” hit home. We’ve been hearing that more lately (all the PR from CES isn’t helping in this regard) and will address it. It’s clear that we can be doing a better job presenting what we do, in fact, have out there. I want to make sure you are aware of a couple resources we have. Specifically the Development section of our community site – http://community.buglabs.ne…. Here you’ll find both Bug Labs developers and others posting information relevant to getting the most out of your BUG. There’s also our wiki – http://bugcommunity.com/wik…. If you look around there you’ll find all our hardware schematics, BOMs, Gerbers, etc. You mentioned Ponoko – you’ll find all our CAD files on the wiki too. In fact one of the IDEO guys is making it easier to play around by putting some files of his own on our community site – http://tinyurl.com/8nlrh8.Re: being transparent and open…as Fred points out, sure we’re a for-profit company but no one here is under any illusion that this being built to “flip”. I tell me investors routinely, and they knew this going in, that it could take ten years for the the idea of open source hardware to go mainstream (or at least as mainstream as FOSS). Everyone here gets paid a fair wage but, again, no one who works at Bug is expecting to get rich quick via an IPO. Everyone here is doing this because we wholeheartedly believe that what we’re doing is useful and helpful and will result in better technology and products for everyone – not just BUG users. You can ask Fred – they didn’t invest in a hardware company when they invested in Bug Labs. They invested in our mission to disrupt CE and make it far easier for everyone to innovate in ways that are impossible right now. That’s only going to happen if we can foster the sort of bottom-up energies that you and our other partners in crime can bring to bear on that goal.I deeply apologize if you feel we are condescending. The last thing I want to do is to set up a company that makes its customers feel alienated! I don’t know if this would help but we have an active IRC channel where lots of great discussion is going on everyday – freenode.net at #buglabs. If you could give me some more concrete ways for us to NOT come across as the “black turtleneck community” I would love to hear them.Re: using our own product – your point is well taken. I started the company and I am not a hardcore hacker. Which, well, is why I started the company! I wanted to be able to build electronics without having to be one. But you are spot on with respect to trying to get there in some simply way. We have to get our product working in all kinds of different ways – both internally at Bug Labs and elsewhere. Everyone at Bug Labs owns a BUG. The folks at IDEO have them too. You will see over the coming weeks an influx of new applications and usages that should hopefully address some of your concerns. For example, just last week, Al Gordon called my cell phone from his BUG because he and community member “cmw_” ported Asterisk and a SIP client to it. I will never forget that day! The point is cool things are being done and the post re that app is on our community site now.Re: your 5 creative ideas….brilliant! They are all great. We are aware of the unsexy, behemoth problem! But honestly, we didn’t start with a budget that would have allowed an Apple-like product. But we figured we’d start with what we had and improve it over time using feedback like yours . We have a bunch of ideas for making things better. One of the reasons we’re doing this project with IDEO is to vector in on what people think would be the most useful changes. I encourage you to stay engaged with us as we go.Lastly – you won’t see this in any investor pitch or YouTube video. It IS all about code or as we say at Bug Labs “Lines of Code” or LOC. At the end of the day we will be judged on whether or not we are improving the lives of our users. Hopefully we’ll get there. Thanks again for your comments. Please keep them coming. If you live in or near NYC, I’d like to invite you to come visit us. I think you’d enjoy meeting the gang. I know they’d enjoy meeting you.

      1. fredwilson

        Great comment Peter, thanks for stopping by and giving your perspective. Iappreciate it and I suspect so does everyone else.

  8. jake

    well, apparently they’re not really too open in the sense that a – they moderate that blog, so probably there’s a reason why no one’s actual posts have made it up there. so instead, i guess i’m going to post my ideas here? hopefully you don’t over moderate too – as an actual, playing “target customer” i would appreciate if someone somewhere paid me some attention, but whatever.—begin rant i posted at ideo—why did i take my time to write this? because behind the ridiculous over-hype is a decent idea here, but it’s going to take a pretty dedicated folks (like me?) of shovel through all the bull to something meaningful./begin digging/if i’m completely honest, as a member of the “community” i’d like to see a whole lot less marketing jargon from you for a start, and more ideas and source code. instead of reinventioning the value added peer-designed net-central modularity through deep dives, why don’t you just actually build something that looks cool that i can buy with my recession-proof self-imposed electronics budget? i don’t need more prototypes and concepts… i’ve got plenty of those already sketched out on scratch paper here on my desk and no you can’t have them because they’re me and i’m an individual and they’re part of my individuality. what i’d really like is a set of cases i can choose from, in like 20 different colors, in files i can tweak and bring to ponoko or someone like that and make myself. i want to build it, i don’t want you or bug or anyone else to build it for me.if you really wanted to be transparent and open, maybe start with the basics… like how much are you getting paid for this work? i’d love to contribute my own ideas, but i want the *community* and my friends that i’ve met through that community to benefit from my hard work, not just another high paid firm, venture capital partner, or some entrepreneur that doesn’t care at all about anything but trying to take bug labs public through an ipo. seriously guys… if you’re really going to be “open source,” then act it and more importantly, mean it! less rhetoric please. in any community, you have to earn the right to be linguistically colloquial. it’s like me calling you the “design yuppie community” or “black turtleneck community” – doesn’t feel right, does it? a bit out of place? maybe even condescending? precisely. so stop calling it the “bug community,” you’re talking down to me and that doesn’t make me feel like contributing anything… i feel like the nerd at school who’s being bullied by the popular kid into doing his homework for him. or worse, being bulled by the band dork or artsy kid. i don’t care what you call it, i don’t want to be someone’s “crowdsource” … i want to make something cool and show it off to my friends. and no, not through twitter, in person. yeah – real, live person, when i meet them for real at a real place.the bug base is not the end all be all, it’s a tool and a means to an end. right now, it doesn’t do anything. can’t pete hire you to just write some code that makes the bug do something new and share it with all of us finally? i mean seriously? linus torvalds has a successful open source project because guess what? he’s the guy who coded it! he’s not just the guy who had an idea, pitched it to vc’s, got money, built an organization, and hired business school grads to manage other guys to build it for him. no, he stayed up late at night and wrote his own code. does no one understand that that’s the real problem here?!?!how many guys at ideo own or have used a bug base before? why don’t you start there, contribute some code, and then suggest how to improve it after you’ve tried to solve your own personal needs with it? here’s an idea: a portable jargon generator that randomly spits out blog posts like these with zero content, high expectations, and lots of transparent hierarchy that make readers feel like a small little guy…? that’d actually be funny too, and you could use it as an ice breaker at your next ideation session or staff meeting./end digging/on the bright side, here are 5 ideas to get your creative juice ideologist imagineers (poor, underpaid design analysts i’m sure) can consider:1 – the shape is boring. can i can some angles, or rounded edges? even if it was bigger, rounded would look much cooler. if you guys subscribed to engadget for a week, you’d see thousands of devices that look 1000’s of times sexier. also can i get a slick handle on one side?2 – the screen is, frankly, on the wrong side. why are you forcing me to view this thing from one angle? why is it a rectangle in the first place?3 – let’s be honest with ourselves, no one’s carrying this behemoth in their pockets… i keep mine in my bag … i’d like to have a display on top so i can look in my bag, find the info i want, and then zip up the bag again so no one ever has to see my bugbase4 – white?! black?! come on, seriously? that’s so first gen ipod. i’ll pay you $500 right now for a brushed titanium case. $800 if it’s got nice smooth black rubberized gripping around the edge5 – the case itself should adapt to the modules, so i have the option of putting modules inside of itthere. some actual thought-through ideas, but first you had to deal with “negative customer feedback”… let’s see how this post gets distorted into somebody’s investor presentation, and then into yet another hilarious condescending youtube video by some marketing guy at bug labs. please guys, everyone, actually… please get real and just write code so didn’t waste my money.

    1. Travis

      Hi Jake, thank you for sharing such an impassioned response. We’re sorting through your feedback and we’ll definitely be replying on the the IDEO blog. As a start, you make a very good point about moderation; we’ve turned it off and will leave it off (and deal with any spam after the fact). I’ve posted your comment verbatim and hope you’ll continue to share your ideas.Thanks, Travis.

      1. Peter Semmelhack

        I agree with Fred – great stuff and thanks for taking the time write it all down. I wish all our customers gave us such candid feedback. Let me address your points one at a time.Re: comment moderation at IDEO – there is not supposed to be any. I’ve pinged the folks there to make sure that’s the case. Please feel free to post your comments on our blog too – http://community.buglabs.net. WIth your permission I’d be happy to cut and paste them over there too. Everyone should get the benefit of your insights – positive or negative. We absolutely want to hear everything.Re: Digging… Your points on less marketing and more “ideas and source code” hit home. We’ve been hearing that more lately (all the PR from CES isn’t helping in this regard) and will address it. It’s clear that we can be doing a better job presenting what we do, in fact, have out there. I want to make sure you are aware of a couple resources we have. Specifically the Development section of our community site – http://community.buglabs.ne…. Here you’ll find both Bug Labs developers and others posting information relevant to getting the most out of your BUG. There’s also our wiki – http://bugcommunity.com/wik…. If you look around there you’ll find all our hardware schematics, BOMs, Gerbers, etc. You mentioned Ponoko – you’ll find all our CAD files on the wiki too. In fact one of the IDEO guys is making it easier to play around by putting some files of his own on our community site – http://tinyurl.com/8nlrh8.Re: being transparent and open…as Fred points out, sure we’re a for-profit company but no one here is under any illusion that this being built to “flip”. I tell my investors routinely, and they knew this going in, that it could take ten years for the the idea of open source hardware to go mainstream (or at least as mainstream as FOSS). Everyone here gets paid a fair wage but, again, no one who works at Bug is expecting to get rich quick via an IPO. Everyone here is doing this because we wholeheartedly believe that what we’re doing is useful and helpful and will result in better technology and products for everyone – not just BUG users. You can ask Fred – they didn’t invest in a hardware company when they invested in Bug Labs. They invested in our mission to disrupt CE and make it far easier for everyone to innovate in ways that are impossible right now. That’s only going to happen if we can foster the sort of bottom-up energies that you and our other partners in crime can bring to bear on that goal.I deeply apologize if you feel we are condescending. The last thing I want to do is to set up a company that makes its customers feel alienated! I don’t know if this would help but we have an active IRC channel where lots of great discussion is going on everyday – freenode.net at #buglabs. If you could give me some more concrete ways for us to NOT come across as the “black turtleneck community” I would love to hear them.Re: using our own product – your point is well taken. I started the company and I am not a hardcore hacker. Which, well, is why I started the company! I wanted to be able to build electronics without having to be one. But you are spot on with respect to trying to get there in some simple way. We have to get our product working in all kinds of different ways – both internally at Bug Labs and elsewhere. Everyone at Bug Labs owns a BUG. The folks at IDEO have them too. You will see over the coming weeks an influx of new applications and usages that should hopefully address some of your concerns. For example, just last week, Al Gordon called my cell phone from his BUG because he and community member “cmw_” ported Asterisk and a SIP client to it. I will never forget that day! The point is cool things are being done and the post re that app is on our community site now.Re: your 5 creative ideas….brilliant! They are all great. We are aware of the unsexy, behemoth problem! But honestly, we didn’t start with a budget that would have allowed an Apple-like product. But we figured we’d start with what we had and improve it over time using feedback like yours . We have a bunch of ideas for making things better. One of the reasons we’re doing this project with IDEO is to vector in on what people think would be the most useful changes. I encourage you to stay engaged with us as we go.Lastly – you won’t see this in any investor pitch or YouTube video. It IS all about code or as we say at Bug Labs “Lines of Code” or LOC. At the end of the day we will be judged on whether or not we are improving the lives of our users. Hopefully we’ll get there. Thanks again for your comments. Please keep them coming. If you live in or near NYC, I’d like to invite you to come visit us. I think you’d enjoy meeting the gang. I know they’d enjoy meeting you.

  9. iHearAmericaSnoring

    fascinating i look forward to the progress.

  10. Korf

    Hey Fred – Leisa @leisa just did this with Drupal – completely open and inclusive:Her web2.0 talk on the subject: http://blip.tv/file/1400046http://www.disambiguity.com…She’s one of the best in user experience designa and provided great leadership on this project. Recommended.