Meebollionaires

There is a bunch of crap in the news right now about how Instagram is super horrible and everything. A week before that, I think everyone was still super excited about how it was a rags-to-riches story from an overnight success by a pair of stalwart product developers who stumbled into a Zuck-quisition.

I actually hated Instagram from the very beginning, but not for this reason.

I hated Instagram because of the death of meebo.

Let’s back the truck up for a moment because I am sure you are confused.

What the hell does meebo have to do with anything?

What the hell is meebo anyway?

Meebo was a hammer in search of nails. I was one of those nails, as a software developer `spending time as a consultant inside of a hardware company. Their firewalls were for serious and when I wanted to be all up in people’s Socials, meebo was a great tool that brought all the power of instant messaging into the browser.

I also think it is where the Instagram founding team cut their teeth on making great products—and Instagram was acquired because it was a great product.

Meebo was also a great product. It just had a very limited use case and certainly not one that would merit spending significant money on. It is a great example of how fucking hard it really is to make a successful venture-scale business because at the end of the day they had the majority of what they needed to be successful, plus or minus a few million customers willing to spend “not zero” dollars.

It is hard to write about this because I really loved using meebo. They did so many clever things. They were so smart they even put a string into the bottom of their web page as a breadcrumb for recruiting. If you were interested enough in their product to use the “view as source” button in your browser, they put an email address in there for recruiting purposes. How clever is that?

The reason I want to talk about meebo, aside from the obvious need to grieve its loss, is how it applies to software development and success today.

I am in the process of iterating my way towards an MVP. I talked about it a few weeks ago. I am in the process of going through all of the cosmetic UI/UX things that are needed before I trot this product out in front of a limited test audience.

As we have iterated our way towards acceptability, I have found myself looking for an appropriate lens to describe this process.

I have settled on the need for this experience to feel as good as I felt when I was using meebo.

I am pretty sure that helps almost nobody to understand what I am looking for in my MVP.

So I have attempted to figure out what that looks like for a web application and how to express that as a set of PWA rules.

Here is where I have so far:

1. Every button must have a clear purpose. If you do not need to press it when you are a new user, you probably do not need to see it. Disable it at a minimum, hide it more ideally. The less you need to teach your new customer, the better off you will be. If you have 1 page of data and you have buttons to take you to page (n – 1) or page (n + 1) you should probably hide them at the start, no one should click on a button that takes you from page 1 to page 1.
2. Pixel perfection is a minimum. If you have multiple tabs of windows, or multiple panes of data, make sure they line up perfectly every time. If you have a window that is even a single pixel off when you are tabbing front and back between windows, you are doing something horribly wrong. Line up the tops and bottoms of all of your windows and change those sizes at your own peril.
3. Concurrently resize as few things as possible. If you have two columns of data and you are resizing the window, do not resize both at the same time. Keep one of them consistent and resize its width on your own.
4. Minimize a column on mobile if it is unnecessary, and add a button to slide it in and slide it out as needed.
5. All of your operations need to possess symmetry. If you have a button to set the number of entries per page to 50 from 10, make sure you can set it back to 10 from 50 if you want to. If you are starting with 25 entries on that page, and you can set it to 10 or 50, but not return it to 25 entries, you should probably remove 25 as the default starting value or add it as an option to your pagination.
6. Put something interesting and helpful in your tooltips. I know you don’t get the benefit of mouse-overs on mobile devices. You can do tooltips on a long press event if you really need it.
7. Resize the shit out of your window. When I look at an application now, I drag it around the screen like a crazy person. Make sure the resizing looks really good in realtime and that you don’t have some screwy resizing code that winds up breaking your screens.
8. Be ruthless in eliminating scrollbars. Keep them internally consistent. There are expensive books on UI/UX that tell you to avoid horizontal scrollbars—I do not know that there are enough books telling you to make sure you are controlling your vertical scrollbars. If you have too many scrollbars, your application will feel awful. I especially despise the scrollbar on the absolute right of the browser, indicating there is more for the whole page. You are better served by dynamic pagination or by keeping scrollbars inside your content panes. When I see three scrollbars on the screen, I get filled with furious outrage that exceeds the searing hot intensity of a thousand suns.

I apologize if I have triggered any design people with my eight random angry rules of designeyness. They come from a good place—my desire to make an application that feels good to use.

I want to make sure that my MVP feels as good to customers as meebo felt to me.

If that also means that I sell my next startup to the Zuck-inator for umpteen jillion dollars, hey that would also be okay by me.

Thank you for reading along! I apologize I am not able to show off my interesting little tool for solving tedious creativity yet. It is giving me some anxiety that it is not quite ready for a select few users to kick the tires. I am hoping that it will be ready in Nov-tober. I am supremely confident I can continue to regale you with interesting stories that have nothing to do with my MVP product until then.