Rocket Whale Blog

When we aren’t busy creating the world’s best policy management software, we’re usually working hard building awesome for some great clients.

A portion of our recent work with Home Depot highlights a common misconception in the tech industry: that software alone can change people’s behavior. It’s more common in the enterprise world, but many startups think along the same lines. If creating technology is what you’re good at, it’s only natural to want to do that to try to influence change.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work like that.

In the enterprise world, when that fails, it can be really tempting for someone at the top to wield their stick of power and say “use this software now” or “do things this way now”.

It’s a short-sighted fix.

That’s like asking people to get in a boat with no compass, no life jackets, no defenses against pirates and sharks, and no explanation about where the boat is headed. Would anyone want to get in that boat?

Here’s how it should actually work.

Your goal is to bring people from Today Island to Future Island. This requires 3 different components:

1. Vision

In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Vision could otherwise be called sales and marketing. This is your pitch. Your goal is to inspire people to want to go to Future Island using a strong narrative for change. Like a politician, you can go positive or negative. Either way, your goal is to create a gap between Today Island and Future Island that makes Future Island look 10x better.

Keep in mind your pitch is going to be different depending on the audience. For each different audience segment, you’ll need a pitch that creates that 10x gap. Don’t forget to Start With Why!

2. Safety

One of the reasons change is so hard is because people fear leaving the relative safety of Today Island.

“I’ve been on Today Island a while and everything’s been fine so far - why leave? There are sharks! What if the boat sinks?! What if Future Island isn’t what you say it is?!!”

You need to reassure your audience members that Future Island and the journey to it is safe. This starts with discovery. Talk to the people who’d be affected by the change and ask, ‘if you did XYZ instead of ABC, what would you be worried about?” Drill deeper with follow up questions like, “And why is that bad (or good or confusing or whatever)?” and “What happens to you if that happens?”

Be prepared for people to lie. Don’t worry, it’s usually not on purpose. Try to discover their true pain, even if they won’t say it. Oftentimes, true pain can be embarrassing or career-inhibiting if verbalized.

Note: this is really hard. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get it perfect. Just putting in the effort to listen to people might be enough to make people feel safe.

Next, your job is to create things to make those worries go away. It could be as simple as talking it out. Or it could be new incentives, training workshops, a new structure, or something else along those lines.

3. Support

If you’ve sold your vision and your audience members are feeling safe, they’ll be asking, “How?” That’s a great place to be! Now your job is to support employees with the tools and training they need to make the journey to Future Island a successful one.

If software is your boat, don’t forget the other tools people need on an ocean voyage. Like directions! In our analogy, directions = training. It could be training on the software tool itself, personal growth training, or tactical training about how to make the change.

A Final Note

Almost every web application has pages with search capability. The parameters of the search are typically reflected in the URL’s query parameters. However, manipulating these query parameters can often be tricky in Single Page Web Applications. In most cases, developers want the client-side router to route based on the path and not the query parameters, since there is typically a one-to-one correspondence between paths and controllers.

There are a few requirements that users expect from their URLs

Users should be able to copy a URL (with query parameters) and share it with someone else, who should see the page exactly the same way

Users should be able to navigate back and forward as the query parameters change and have the page contents reflect the query parameters

AngularJS makes getting and setting URL query parameters easy with their $location service. However, if you’re not careful, the query parameters and $scope variables can easily get out of sync and then the browser’s back and forward buttons will no longer work as expected. To ensure the query parameters and $scope variables are always in sync, make sure:

$scope variables are always a reflection of the query parameters. Use $scope.$watch on $location.search() to watch for query parameter changes and then update the $scope variables.

changes start by updating the query parameters. Use $location.search(search, paramValue) to change query parameters, which will then change the $scope variables.

Here’s an example of a page that shows a list of users that can be filtered by group:

https://gist.github.com/SamDuvall/01cc4afcf614311b9806

The hypothetical pages below would display the list of users based on the URL string:

https://example.com/users shows a list of all available users

From time to time I notice things in “the real world” that can be further explained with behavioral economics. Today’s topic is baseball’s save stat.

Ask any baseball stathead their thoughts on saves and the value of closers and you’re sure to get a scornful response.

Announcers and sportswriters continue to question why teams’ seemingly best relievers are only used for save situations. Teams lose games without ever putting in their best reliever, and then that same pitcher “saves” a game 4 days later that the team very likely would have won anyway.

Surely, most front offices today (sorry Phillies fans) are using better methods to evaluate relievers. And surely this new information can be used to optimize how arms in the bullpen are used.

Yet the save stat prominently lives on and bullpens are still managed around it. Why?

Humans Aren’t Computers

Humans don’t act in their own rational self-interest. They don’t make logical decisions, they make emotional ones that often come from an irrational place. There are countless cognitive biases always in effect, and the rationality of a decision is bounded by the information we have at the moment we make it.

What’s going on in the case of closers, the save stat, and the decisions around those 2 things is a result of Prospect Theory. Prospect Theory is very interesting in itself - I recommend you click that link and read about it. The two components relevant to the context of this article are:

Losses hurt more than gains feel good. The effect is about 2.25 times more powerful. For example, according to the irrational human brain, avoiding a $5 surcharge feels equal to getting a discount of $11.25.

Humans are risk-averse when there is a high probability of feeling a gain, and they are willing to overpay for certainty. For example, given a 95% chance to win $10,000 or 100% chance to obtain $9,499, they’ll take the $9,499 (and probably even less) even though the expected payout of the first scenario is $9,500.

The End of a Baseball Game is Prospect Theory at Work

When it’s the end of a game, and it doesn’t feel certain that a victory is at hand (a reasonable cutoff for that feeling being a lead of 4+ runs), managers, GMs, fans, and players alike are all willing to overpay for the certainty of not feeling a loss. So in comes the closer for the save. This is normal, risk-averse, human behavior and it’s not going to stop until teams are managed by computers or Phil Ivey.

How about close games? Why are closers saved for when a team is ahead? And why aren’t they used in the 7th inning with no outs and Mike Trout coming up with the bases loaded?

Here are the possible outcomes of a baseball game ranked on a “feeling scale” from most powerful to least powerful.

-4.5: Losing when you thought you were going to win

+3.25: Winning when you thought you were going to lose

-2.25: Losing

+1: Winning

0: Game suspended due to rain

Pitchers can’t create a win (from the mound, at least). They can only not lose. So the 2 losing scenarios govern a manager’s bullpen decision-making in those close games.

Technically, a pitcher can’t “not lose” in the 7th inning as there are still 2 more innings to play. In that moment, there are all kinds of unconscious calculations a manager’s brain makes in the background to help him quickly decide how to optimize the use of the bullpen to not lose.

Whatever those calculations are, the decision is usually the same: the closer’s butt stays glued to the bench and in comes a non-closer reliever. And the real reason why, no matter what the manager says, is that he’s optimizing to avoid the greatest loss possible: losing when you thought you were going to win.

It’s fair to reiterate that this isn’t something managers are consciously doing. They aren’t calculating odds of victory (or not losing) and choosing a reliever accordingly. This is all happening unconsciously based on thousands of years of evolution that has turned us into loss-avoiding scaredy cats.

Saves = Loss Avoidance

So why is losing when you thought you were going to win so painful? Any loss sucks. It feels crappy. But when you thought you were going to win? That feels much worse! Why? It’s because your point of reference changed. You already felt and accounted for the gain of the win. So now instead of feeling one loss, you’re feeling that loss PLUS the loss of the win you thought you had. Major bummer!

The save stat is simply a representation of loss avoidance. Closers aren’t paid to accumulate saves. They’re paid for what the save attempt represents: an opportunity to increase the certainty that a team’s stakeholders won’t feel the pain of losing what, in their mind, is already a win. In other words, they aren’t paid to get saves, they’re paid to not get blown saves. This differs from what non-closer relievers are paid to do and, as we’ve already learned, humans are willing to overpay to avoid the loss of a near-certain gain.

That’s why saves and blown saves matter. They’re the best metrics we have to describe the reality of the irrational human brain of baseball’s decision makers.

What do the numbers say?

I used Spotrac’s Free Agent Tracker to get a list of all the free agent reliever signings from 2012-2015 (2012 is as far back as it goes). I used FanGraphs to filter the list of relievers to those with a SD-MD% of over 60% in order to remove the relievers signed for middle-innings mopop work. Depth relievers aren’t signed to not lose. Last, I compared the average annual value of the remaining closer contracts to the non-closer contracts to get a ratio of how much closers are valued over regular relievers.

I averaged the 4 ratios and it comes out to 2.91. To be honest, I thought it’d be more like 2, as the value of relievers signed to not lose (2.25) is half of those signed to not lose when you thought you were going to win (4.5).

This variance might be due to small sample size, incomplete data, using the wrong data, or perhaps I just don’t know what I’m talking about.

Here at Rocket Whale, we practice design driven development. We fight for every pixel to ensure our users experience their application in its full glory. Fighting for pixels can be a tedious battle, however. For example, below is a landing page with a 2 column x N rows layout with a combination of text and images.

Before flexbox, we would use Bootstrap 3 to layout this page with its responsive grid system. It was easy to lay things out. However, each screen size (xs,sm,md,lg) required nudging the margin manually to get the image to line up vertically with the text. In our example that could require 12 different margin-tops. How tedius! And then someone alters the paragraph text, which then moves the text onto the next line, which means now the centering is out of whack! That's whack!

Take a look at the HTML framework code below

https://gist.github.com/SamDuvall/69e392b482f5324bbb31

Recently, one of our biggest clients, Rocket Fuel, went public. It looks like they’re doing pretty well:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/21/us-rocket-fuel-ipo-idUSBRE98J0JR20130921

On almost every project where we use backbone (which is most of them), we inevitably come across the following problem: How do we mirror the has_one and has_many relationships (that Rails does so well) on the client with backbone?

We’ve evaluated several available options, but haven’t found much success. Backbone.Relational gets slow with large data sets and is a huge memory leak, unless you manage it.  backbone-associations just isn’t powerful enough to cover most of our use cases.

We had some cool art drawn up for us by the amazing artist behind our t-shirts and I thought it'd be a good idea to show off some of his work.

Here are the results, all framed and everything!

Wouldn't this look great on a kid's t-shirt?  Some day...

Our current t-shirt design looks fantastic as a sketch!

No, he's not high, he's just sleepy. Like me, the Rocket Whale is not a morning person (whale).

How does his body fit in the rocket? Magic, I think...

We had an awesome time presenting at ATLRUG last night!  There wasn’t an empty seat in the house.  As promised, here are the slides from our presentation:

Ruby 2.0

Push Server

Tonight at the Atlanta Ruby User Group meetup, our very own Sam Duvall will be talking about the exciting new changes in Ruby 2.0 along with a tutorial on push servers. We'll also be giving away a few of our spectacular hot-off-the-press t-shirts. And if that wasn't enough, we'll be sponsoring some drinks afterwards at Cypress St. Pint & Plate.

Sounds good, right? Great. Come get nerdy with us.

'Tis the season! Rocket Whale is a sponsor of HypeElephant, the first ever Hypepotamus winter seasonal event dedicated to bringing cheer and laughter to all attendees. There will be plenty of egg nog and munchies for all - so get off your keyster and come have a good time with us!

For the gift exchange, bring an undesirable gift of any shape or size (suggested range of $10-15). The only requirement is that you must wrap it and create a handcrafted gift tag denoting you as the giver. Prizes are available for:

Most Amazing Gift Tag

WTF? Gift (most undesirable)

Best Hippo-Related Gift

... Adam Harrell of Nebo Agency for his referral of Ben Robinson, Rocket Whale's new UX Designer. After working with him at Nebo, Adam knew Ben's popular catchphrases such as "don't botch this" and "I haven't eaten lunch since yesterday" would go over nicely at Rocket Whale. Adam said the $500 will be funding shots at the Nebo company Christmas party. Whether he's serious or not, it sounds like a sweet party!

Here is a Minimum Viable Photo of the exchange. For our next referral sprint, I think we'll use a real camera. Beware the demon eyes!

Rocket Whale is hiring a UI Architect/Designer to lead the product design of our headline client’s new flagship web app. After going through many resumes and applications, I wanted to provide some advice to any UX professionals that are looking for challenging work at interesting companies. If you want boring work with boring people, then you need not proceed.

Your resume is a landing page of you from a professional perspective and you should design it as such. The purpose of a landing page is to give high-level details that entice users to dig deeper. Likewise, your resume’s goal is to get a phone call, not to get hired.

As a UI/UX professional, you have the baked-in skills necessary to create a resume with a great user interface. Use these skills to your advantage! If you cannot design a simple, user-friendly landing page for yourself, a topic of which you have intimate domain knowledge, why would I expect that can do this for a much more complex project of which you’ll start with little to no domain knowledge? Your resume is the only design project that is guaranteed to be looked at by the company that wants to hire you!

So how do you go about this? Use the standard customer discovery process. Talk to potential users (HR, hiring managers, etc.) at companies similar to those you want to work at and understand what is important to them. Create an MVP, test it with users and iterate until the design is complete. Measure your success, reach out for feedback when you don’t get to the next step of the hiring process and tweak as necessary. Not only will this give you a resume that stands out, it’ll give you a great story to tell when you interview. Beep bop boop, job search over.

To help get you started, this is what we’re interested in learning about at the resume stage:

Do your personal and professional goals align with the position we are hiring for?

Do you have the skills necessary for the position? If not, are you capable of learning them and are you excited to do so?

Do you have results that back up what you say you can do?

And, most importantly for a UI/UX professional, can you communicate all of this in a simple, organized, elegant and interesting manner?

Interesting companies (like Rocket Whale!) look for creative people that solve problems in interesting ways. Your resume is a great opportunity to show (not tell) a prospective employer that you can do this right away. Pounce on that opportunity.

We are very proud to have reached this milestone in our company and are looking for help from you to grow our company. This is your chance to make a dream come true. Have you always wanted to receive one of those oversized checks that makes it appear like you've accomplished something? What am I talking about? Of course you have. If you refer the lucky person we hire for any of the following positions, we will personally deliver an oversized check for $500 to you wherever you are in the lower 48 states.

We'll take a photo (well, someone else will as it will be difficult for us considering the giant check we'll be holding) and put you on our blog that I've been told "several" people read.

We're hiring a UI/UX Designer and at least one Software Developer. Thanks!

I saw this on a blog I follow (thanks, swissmiss) and I liked it so I bought the print, framed it, and put it on the wall. The optimist in me wishes it were true 100% of the time, but the cynic in me recognizes that it isn't. That probably just makes me like it more.

We are proud to announce the launch of Preparis’s new marketing site! Preparis is an all-in-one emergency preparedness portal that helps companies keep their employees safe during crisis situations. They were looking for a redesigned and easier to manage marketing web site and we were up to the task.  Go check it out or read more about the project on our web development work page.

Team Rocket Whale wins the SendGrid award at Startup Riot MAKE for their HowTracker Policies and Procedures software. We had a great time hacking away for a weekend and we built a very alpha version of our upcoming policies and procedures software, which we continue to make progress on and expect to release within the next couple of months.

Our prize was a Sphero, which is essentially a phone/tablet powered cat toy that Sam's cats enjoy tremendously. The award comes from SendGrid, primarily as a result of our users being able to attest to policies by simply responding to an email.