Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

- Winston Churchill

Failure is the tenet of any entrepreneur.

It strips away preconceptions and reveals truths that have long eluded us. It’s this feedback that helps refine our mental models to predict the world more accurately.

Having been on a journey to become the world’s best software designers for nearly 15 years, we’re well versed with failure.

However, sometimes you have a failure that doesn’t reveal anything.

No feedback means no growth.

Our Steam redesign is one of those failures.

Let’s recap.

As mentioned in the “Where to from here” post, we need recognition. Recognition results in leverage, and leverage affords us the opportunity to solve big problems.

Permissionless redesigns are an effective means of getting recognition. Our ICONex redesign article landed us Balanced, and our WhyICX website was lauded over the official.

To get recognition, we need a product that has obvious deficiencies to improve upon and a large enough user base to help us achieve virality.

Cue Steam.

Steam has around 30 million daily active users, and the Steam community on Reddit has around 2.7 million users. A large audience, and an established distribution channel – this seemed like it would be a slam dunk.

We kicked things off January 2024, and due to time commitments from Balanced, could only make piecemeal contributions throughout the year. A month before Christmas we realised we would need to sprint to avoid it getting lost amongst all the Steam sales and new Steam Deck posts. If I had to estimate, I would say it was a month and a half of full time work all up.

After a punishing few weeks, we were ready to launch. December 18th would be the day PARROT9 was finally discovered amongst a sea of charlatans.

After a launch, we try to go about the day as if nothing has happened. Our anxiety would cripple us otherwise. So when enough time had passed, we took a deep breath, and checked to see the damage.

21 upvotes.

While the comments were supportive, it was a far cry from the splash we had hoped to make.

Maybe another subreddit would get a bit more traction, so we tried r/gaming.

0 upvotes and 2 comments:

These sort of arguments are tiresome. They’re inauthentic. Ignoring the irony of a company that sells games no one actually plays, Valve explicitly states in their employee handbook that they assess candidates on how dangerous they’d be in the hands of the competition. Deliberately making yourself vulnerable to competition due to apathy goes against everything Valve claims to stand for.

In all of my anxious predictions, I never once considered that users might not want better software.

If we couldn’t get Steam’s users to understand that, then maybe it was time to just send it directly to Valve. After all, no one knows Steam better than them. Surely they wouldn’t be foolish enough to ignore problematic issues with their interface. They’ll be so excited to have people who espouse the same values as them, but can also see the problems they can’t – or so we thought:

I used to think the most frustrating thing was not being recognised for our talents amongst a sea of charlatans. Now I realise that it’s being right while nearly everyone else is wrong.

Good design is a well-reasoned debate. No matter what someone challenges with, good design decisions should always prevail.

The Steam redesign essentially boils down to 2 core arguments:

1. Aggregating everything to a single page is better than tabs.

2. There’s too much wasted space.

Number 1 is the most debatable. You could argue that tabs act as jump links, allowing you to quickly jump to sections faster than scrolling. However, in our experience users tend to only click around if they’re lost. This is for the same reason that carousels are ineffective. Additionally, exploration only happens if the content is engaging, and the majority of the content presented to the user is not. Also even if you have a single page, you can still have “tabs” that just act as jump-links. Finally, scrolling is such a natural part of digital life that it only makes sense to leverage that same pattern here.

Number 2 is not debatable. There is a clear waste of space on all the feeds. The right hand column is often void of any information at all. In order to make better use of the space, switching to a 2-column format is the obvious solution. It allows more information density without sacrificing readability.

So the real question is: where to from here?

Let’s start with what we know:

• We’re never going to get the opportunity to solve these problems until others acknowledge that they exist.
• Valve is infinitely more likely to pay attention if Steam’s users are advocating for us.
• People don’t read online, and the redesign article is 24 minutes long.

A PARROT9 maxim is to share the most value, in the shortest time, with the least friction. We haven’t done that yet – but a prototype could. In my experience, even with high-fidelity mock-ups stakeholders can’t connect all the dots until they are using the interface themselves.

The prototype will take time, and until it is finished we need to introduce doubt into the Steam community. Doubt that the interface isn’t as good as it could be, and belief that it can be better. This will be difficult. Valve generally has a good reputation which means any introduction of doubt will be met with a lot of resistance and defensiveness.

We’ll need to start gently.

Redesigning some of the Steam showcases could be effective here. They reek of low effort, don’t utilise space effectively, and are such an obvious but small enough piece of the interface that people won’t push back.

If a lot of the stuff looks obvious with very little change, then it calls into question their abilities by neglecting a lot of low hanging fruit. If we can build up a cadence that people start expecting and looking forward to these redesigns, by the time we launch the prototype we should have a receptive audience to present to.

Until next time.

The brightest stars burn the fastest, so we must love them while we can.

-Anna Todd

Brilliance should be acknowledged, and David Ginder, better known by the pseudonym Near, was brilliant.

Near loved to play SNES RPG games. Unfortunately for Near, some of these games were only produced in Japan with no plans for Western localisation.

Undeterred by this, Near set out to learn Japanese and stumbled onto the still-developing fan localisation scene.

What's important to realise about the localisation process, is that it's more complicated than translating words from Japanese to English. That's hard enough. But when you’re editing compiled code, it may allow for only so many characters to be displayed at once, or use a font that doesn't include characters in the English language.

In order to translate these games, Near would first need to build a proportional font engine. This would allow more information to fit into the dialogue window.

There was only one problem: Near was not a programmer. So, equipped with unlimited time over the summer break, Near began teaching themself. They printed out a 200-page document that explained how the SNES CPU worked, and began trying to understand its secrets.

Despite having access to a computer, Near would write the code onto sheets of paper. This allowed them to “scribble and draw wherever”, and then calculate how it would work in their head. Once they were confident the code made sense, they’d insert it into a game and see what did and didn't work.

I have attempted this fan translation five times. The reason I've started over each time was because I learned more, and felt I could do better. The reason I've released this fifth attempt is because I no longer believe there's anything left that can be improved upon.

These adjustments aren’t implemented using the readable, high-level programming languages developers have become accustomed to. They’re made by painstakingly reverse-engineering the binary with a hex editor. Near’s programming and translation environment would’ve looked similar to this:

If that wasn’t impressive enough, Near was doing this at the ripe old age of 15.

“Brilliant” undersells Near.

What started off with translations for Dragon Quest I & II, was then followed up with a lengthy battle with Bahamut Lagoon, which eventually led to Der Langrisser. But around this time, Near noticed a reoccurring issue: using SNES emulators to test the edited code was causing issues.

To make an emulator fast, you have to sacrifice accuracy. To get around this, most emulators contain internal lists of the most popular 50 or so games. When you load those games, the emulators tweak their timing values and patch out certain areas of code to get these games running correctly. This will result in obscure bugs that aren’t present on an original console.

For Near, this wasn’t good enough:

Video games are a piece of our history, and we need to respect the fact that there is a “true” form they had when released. Imagine if we only had a JPEG of the Mona Lisa, a RealVideo stream of the moon landing, or a MIDI rendition of “Walking in the Air.” We have the ability to keep our past alive, and I feel like it's almost a duty to do so.

So Near started work on their most important historical contribution: the emulator bsnes, one focused on accuracy over performance.

But this accuracy comes at a serious cost. Making an emulator twice as accurate will make it roughly twice as slow; double that accuracy again and you're now four times slower.

At the same time, the rewards for this accuracy diminish quickly. Most games look and feel “playable” at modest levels of emulator accuracy. Near says that most emulators target a “sweet spot” of around 95% compatibility with optimal performance.

Sometimes the correct, more accurate emulation actually produces a “wrong” result. Super Bonk's attract mode demo actually desynchronizes, causing Bonk to get stuck near a wall on most real systems. And Starfox suffers from significant slowdown issues throughout the game. These are certainly not desirable attributes, but they are correct nonetheless. We wouldn't round pi down to 3 simply because irrational numbers are inconvenient, right?

Bsnes is widely considered to be a technical marvel, and one of the most accurate software emulators to ever be produced – all born out of Near’s desire to play games that weren’t localised.

But brilliance comes with a price: it attracts those who aren’t.

Near experienced ruthless online bullying, and publicly retired from the emulation scene citing a desire for a more private life. This followed a series of escalating privacy intrusions and targeted Internet harassment that resulted in Near seeking professional help to manage their anxiety.

Tragically, on this day 3 years ago, Near took their own life.

Near describes themself as having an “overwhelming drive to achieve perfection”. We can honour Near’s memory by setting high standards in our own work, remaining true to the essence of the art form, and focusing on accuracy of execution.

Don’t redesign just to do something new, redesign because you have a better answer to the question.

- Paul Scrivens

Good design unifies presentation and action.

It allows for fluidity between two separate states. The closer the gap between the two, the better the experience. In this sense, good design always condenses down.

Apple used to embody this. Now they do the opposite. For example, in the current version of Apple Music you’re either in the album view, or the song list view:

The only conduit between the two states is a tiny back arrow in the top left of the song list view. A better solution would be to combine these views together, allowing users to choose songs without leaving the Album view – just like iTunes did:

The fluidity between the two states results in a less expensive click. Not only does it show more songs in the combined state, it also borrows from the image search convention. Familiarity helps to reduce the cognitive burden:

This “separation of states” regression has proliferated to tools like Spotlight. For example, searching for a definition in the current version will redirect a user to the dictionary.

Previously this was shown in context:

Is it faster to open an app? Or just show the results in context? Why increase time and effort?

It’s not just Apple that is regressing in this aspect.

Windows 11’s start menu is either in the “Pinned”, or “All apps” state. This is facilitated by a small button in the top right:

Compare this to Windows 10 where you can see both the “Pinned” and “App list” all in one view:

While no one ever expects much from Microsoft, it’s still disappointing to see them stumble away from good design.

It’s important to note that Microsoft’s regressions are the result of business interests overriding the users. It’s harder to show ads without a “Recommended” section. This is in contrast to Apple’s regressions, which have resulted from shifting to a technology-first paradigm, instead of a design-first one.

Another notable Apple regression is what became of “System Preferences”. “System Settings” is evidence that Apple doesn’t “dogfood” their own software. What started out as carefully organised rows, devolved into a sprawling list of icons – many with similar colours reducing scannability:

Apple went from one of the best settings designs, with only minor changes since its inception, to a design where you can’t even figure out how to turn an inactive display off without searching.

Search should be a fallback, but when you present too many options to the user, it becomes noise – and trying to find the signal amongst it just seems like work.

These are only a few of the many issues that now litter Apple’s software. Features like Notifications, App Library, About This Mac, and basically everything new in watchOS 10, are regressions that could all be fixed by going back in time.

It’s disappointing watching a company decline in an area they once pioneered – however it does offer us an opportunity:

If no one is king of software anymore, the throne is ours for the taking.

Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production.

The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.

- Naval Ravikant

We need recognition.

Recognition results in leverage, and leverage affords us the opportunity to solve big problems.

The way we build recognition is through permissionless redesigns.

The one constant business leaders have is that they’re time constrained. A permissionless redesign highlights the existing issues within their software, and then provides the revised solution based on best practice. A report not only tailored to them, but their users as well.

You become difficult to ignore if a user base starts advocating for what you offer. Word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing, after all.

High value opportunities come from high recognition, and high recognition comes from permissionless redesigns.

Our team has the skill set, and a proven strategy, so the question becomes “Which redesign do we start with?”

Problems often get easier if you turn them around in reverse. If you want to help India, the question you should ask is not “How can I help India?” but “What’s doing the worst damage in India, and how do I stop it?”

- Charlie Munger

What’s doing the worst damage in software, and how do we stop it?

Software is getting abused by corporations like Google and Microsoft who only see users as a source of revenue. They frequently put business goals above user goals, invade their privacy, and provide an inferior experience to what could be. Even companies like Apple are beginning to slip in terms of software quality.

How do we stop this?

With Linux.

Linux is nearing its prime time. The pieces are being put in place. But two crucial elements are still missing: a desktop environment designed around best practice, and a marketing site that sells the experience of using the product.

We’re going to dethrone Windows.

Unlike Apple, Microsoft has no ecosystem. The Office Suite and gaming were their competitive advantage, but Google Docs and Proton have since eradicated this.

It’s going to take a lot of development resource to pull this off, so we need buy-in from a large backer. Before we can redesign Linux, we need to prove our worth elsewhere.

You must study the endgame before everything else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame.

- José Raúl Capablanca

Knowing that Linux is the endgame helps give us insight into how to approach the middle and opening game.

Valve earns more per head than Apple. Valve is also making significant contributions to the Linux ecosystem. They’ve contributed resource to Proton, Mesa, and KDE.

Valve is our target.

Luckily for us, Valve’s main source of income, Steam, has many design issues that we can fix. Steam has around 30 million daily active users, and the Steam community on Reddit has around 2.7 million users. People share things of value, so Reddit will be our distribution channel for the Steam redesign.

Showing Steam’s users the void between what is, and what can be, is how we’ll get recognition.

A genius is not born, but is educated and trained.

- László Polgár

László Polgár was a psychologist who was convinced that given sufficient early training, any child could become a genius in a chosen field.

To test this theory, he trained all three of his daughters in chess from the age of 4. All three went on to become chess prodigies, and the youngest, Judit, is considered the best female player in the history of the game.

I've gravitated towards software since kindergarten. From primary school onwards I’d ensure that every computer in my vicinity had only the best software. Family, friends, schools, hospitals – no computer was spared. Three decades of curiosity and obsessive tinkering have refined this into a competitive advantage few have.

I am a connoisseur of software.

I can predict with an alarmingly high degree of accuracy whether a software product will succeed or fail. It’s easy to tell when others “get it”, and when they don’t. Google sunk hundreds of millions into Stadia before they abandoned it. I called it “dead on arrival” 5 months before it had even launched.

I’m part of a collective of talented individuals at PARROT9 who share the same sensibilities and ideals. We intend on taking the title of “world’s best software designers”.

How do we rank software? Whatever reduces time and effort the most.

We strongly believe that software is a tool, and like with most tools, the one that reduces time and effort, is the one that wins out.

It’s amazing how many bad decisions we have avoided by using this as a filter. Does it reduce user time and effort? No? Then discard it.

Everything needs to be rationalised. Every option we add multiplies complexity. The attribute that unites both power users and beginners is a preference for the simplicity. Provide no more than the required information to help them make an informed decision.

Always ready, but not in the way. More direct, with less fluff.

As Bruce Lee once said “One does not accumulate, but eliminate. It is not the daily increase, but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always run to simplicity.”

Unfortunately most software made today does not share the same ideals. It’s needy, it’s verbose, it’s invasive, and it’s manipulative.

One of the mental models I liked from Steve Jobs was the concept of essence. He believed all products had an essence that is only fulfilled through use.

For example, a cup’s essence is fulfilled when it’s being drunk out of. A shoe’s essence is being fulfilled when it’s walked in.

It was this line of thinking that created the original idea for Toy Story: A toy’s essence is only fulfilled when it is played with.

Software’s essence is fulfilled when people complete a task. Anything that prevents them from doing so taints that essence.

A user did not download your app to be spammed with irrelevant notifications. They did not visit your website to browse through ads. They did not use your operating system to be tracked online.

In order to solve this problem, we need to create alternatives. As Buckminster Fuller once said “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

I believe in getting it right from the start. Too many companies adopt Facebook’s “Move fast and break things” philosophy. Everyone wants to be like Apple, but no one wants to behave like Apple.

An interface should only change if it absolutely needs to. Users hate change. If you have to change your initial interface more than 20%, then you didn’t do enough internal testing before launch. The greatest sin is mediocrity.

This is why I’m here.

To prevent shit software. To create a desirable alternative. To make sure we’re considered the best in history.