44: Swings and Roundabouts

Craig Stanford, co-founder of Clipp, joins the couch to talk about start ups, onboarding and the little men who run the internet. Following up on his attempts to space out his table view cells, Jake explains how he solved his problem and why he wanted to space out his cells in the first place: a header view that contains branding and collapses when scrolled. This prompts concern from Craig, and Jake ends up defending his position. Before Jake can launch into asking questions, Jelly suggests actually introducing their guest, and gets Craig to explain what Clipp is, what it’s like in the world of start ups, as well as a bit of the story about how Clipp got started. When Craig starts talking about how excited beacons get him, and how he’d love to find a good way to use them in Clipp, Jake takes the opportunity to complain about the permissions dialogs iOS presents, which he feels give the wrong impression to users. Jelly uses this to steer the conversation away from beacons, and to discuss what the best context is for asking users for permission to access features. This leads to a discussion of onboarding and whether it’s good or bad. The couch then discusses an app that Jake is working on currently, and how he might solve his issues with permissions and onboarding. At this point, Jake turns the conversation a little by asking Craig what his point of view is on work hours. This spurs discussion about work ethic, what it means to work too hard, and eventually health. Jake and Jelly talk about how they’ve been trying to improve their health by walking more, and how to motivate yourself to do it. The idea of motivating users prompts a conversation about gameification and what that means. Jelly explains his opinion that gameification has a bad rap because we’ve taken the wrong lessons from games, and ends up going back to onboarding, using the first level of Super Mario as an example.