Joshua Platt

Kyle Steed on Design

2012-05-08 00:00:00 -0700

“If you aren’t solving a problem then you aren’t designing.”

Bill Buxton on Making

2012-04-19 00:00:00 -0700

“When we try to get ideas out there, we have to understand it’s not just the idea that matters. The marketing, the business, and more have to be designed with just as much detail. It’s our job to figure all these parts of this ecosystem out.”

Michael Schechter on Free Services

2012-04-11 00:00:00 -0700

“If Facebook buying Instagram pissed you off, I have a suggestion. Don’t just stop using Instagram, stop using free social networks and services period. Stop using sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare or Pinterest, because it is a given that they will all inevitably let you down in favor of the bottom line1. More often than not, when you actually quit a service, it’s not because they were evil. It’s just because they either became useless or boring. The reality is that you’re not going to stop using services that are useful to you2. You’re just going to waste time switching from one company to the next until your latest service inevitably falls short or sells out.”
— Michael Schechter

From Stop Crying About Free Services.

C.S. Lewis on Attempt

2012-03-21 00:00:00 -0700

“When a thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility.”

On Rdio

2012-03-13 00:00:00 -0700

I was in high school when iTunes was first released. I stayed up until 2 am carefully crafting my first playlist from ripped CDs. Tracks were added based on how they fit the mood of the playlist. The last note of each track had to flow into the first note of the next. The finishing touch was a pseudo-poetic title like “as we lay dying”. The next school day I shared my freshly burned playlist with friends. I was overjoyed to find they too had been up all night creating playlists. Sharing with friends was how I found new music. Actually, sharing music was how I made friends. Many joy filled memories from high school are tied to sharing playlists.

“Rdio is bringing the joy back. They have captured that intrinsic characteristic of music which is community.”

While iTunes is a fantastic tool, and still the primary way I acquire music, it does not connect with that joy anymore. For want of a better word, it’s become closed. Music wants to be shared. It wants to be social and part of a community. Apple tried with Ping, but they got it backwards. It focused too much on the artist.

Rdio, in my humble opinion, has made a brilliant move. Their new interface puts greater focus on the human side. They’ve made it simpler to share and discover music with your friends. Rdio is bringing the joy back. They have captured that intrinsic characteristic of music which is community. For me that is the key to Rdio fitting into my life. It replaces Pandora and Pitchfork, not iTunes. I still intend to buy music to support the artist. $5 a month is a bargain for getting the joy of sharing and discovering music back as far as I’m concerned.

Product Storytellers

2012-02-27 00:00:00 -0800

“A product is more than an idea, it's more than a website, and it's more than a transaction or list of functionalities. A product should provide an experience or service that adds value to someone's life through fulfilling a need or satisfying a desire. The ultimate question then becomes: who identifies that value? After the executive or stakeholder identifies the initial idea, who in the organization ensures that the product and experience deliver value to the user? Maybe it isn't the product manager, marketer, technologist, or designer; perhaps what we need is a new role: the product storyteller.”
— Sarah Doody

Sarah does an excellent job explaining something I’ve been lobbying for the past year. Products can’t just be the manifestation of a feature list. They tell a story. They engage the user and carry them on a journey. That’s why we need more storytellers at the heart of each product development team. I agree 100% with Sarah that we need a new role to make the most of this idea: Product Storytellers.

Less, but Better

2012-01-27 00:00:00 -0800

A collection of Braun electronics from the Dieter Rams era. His “less, but better” approach to design produced incredibly timeless products. They look just as modern today as they did when first released.

I think we are entering an era of design which will produce timeless software interfaces. We can see it already. Things like iA Writer & Byword are replacing Word© for writers. What a great time to be designing interfaces.

One Pixel

2012-01-24 00:00:00 -0800

“Sometimes 1 pixel makes all the difference in the world.”

The Laws of Simplicity

2012-01-19 00:00:00 -0800

"The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction"
— John Maeda (The Laws of Simplicty)

John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity is a short yet rich book. It is one 5 books I keep not on a bookshelf, but right on my desk. Every person on my team reads it annualy as a reminder that even though marketing may demand 50 “new” things be added to the product it’s our job to reduce and create order from entropy.

Designers Deal in Ideas

2012-01-19 00:00:00 -0800

“Designers deal in ideas. They give shape to ideas that shape our world, enrich everyday experiences, and improve our lives. Where there’s confusion, designers fashion clarity; where there’s chaos, designers construct order; where there’s entropy, designers promote vitality; where there’s indifference, designers swell passion; where there’s mediocrity, designers imbue excellence; and where there’s silence, designers lend voice.”

Jonathan Ive on Design

2012-01-12 00:00:00 -0800

“It is not about self expression. It is to make something that looks like it wasn’t really designed at all because it’s inevitable.”

What UX Can Learn from Path

2012-01-11 00:00:00 -0800

Path 2.0 has become one of my favorite iPhone apps, so much so that it made its way onto my home screen. There is much to love in Path. Every designer I know raves about the design, how it is original yet completely intuitive. I think there is a lesson on design to be learned.

I imagine the Path team started with a vision. Then they probably did the normal market research, use cases, and personas that have become status quo. I don’t doubt this produced a market requirements list which included the need for hyperlinks, importing friends from Facebook, web pages to see everything, and the like. But creators of Path made many bold design decisions and appear to have ignored the list.

You can’t import friends from other social networks. You can can’t add more than 150 friends, or post hyperlinks. While you can send posts out to Facebook & Twitter, you can not do the reverse. When I first encountered these features I admit I thought they were bugs. It did not take long for me to see how theses omissions made Path focused. It’s not where I post a link to yet another academic paper. It’s where I share my daughter ripping apart a pancake with my 5 dearest friends. Focusing the app on a purpose made it clear where it fit in my life.

I think the current state of design, especially when it comes to apps, has become wrapped up in features. We do research to define what users want and need. This produces a list often which then becomes the products identity. It becomes about what the product does, and how what it does fits into the market. The problem is there are so many apps that all do the same thing. It is just white noise.

Claude Debussy said, “Music is the space between the notes.” I think this is a beautiful concept that applies to the design of apps. Without space between notes you have white noise. It’s the space that brings focus to each note. The genius of Path is that it is less defined by what it does, and more by what it doesn’t. Each time they removed a feature they created space and brought greater focus to what remained. In the end it was the removal of features that brought about something new. It’s not Facebook or Twitter. It’s different.

I think this is the lesson for us designers. The days of adding more to make something cool and different have past us. To many apps are just white noise. They lack focus. We need to recognize that removing features is beginning to have more impact than adding them. Giving greater attention to what should be removed ultimately leads to greater focus on what remains. We need to master the art of removing to create something new.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

2012-01-03 00:00:00 -0800

Just finished Donald Miller’s latest book expecting inspiration for life, and it delivered. If you enjoyed Blue Like Jazz you will enjoy Million Miles. It is different than his prior books, but somehow even more honest. I just loved it.

Grab it on Amazon

Ed Frank on Starters

2012-01-01 00:00:00 -0800

“I think there are two types of people in this world – people who can start things and people who can finish things. And while I place great value on the finishers, it’s the starters who are rare because they can envision what isn’t there.”

Searching for a Webhost

2011-10-28 00:00:00 -0700

During the course of my site redesign two things happened that made me reassess my web hosting. The first was becoming a site speed geek. Static sites are fast, and the techie in me wanted to know if a new host could be faster. Second is Linode kept having issues with their Fremont datacenter and provided no answers as to why. This pissed me off and began the quest for a new host, which ended in a twist.

I’ve chronicled my quest here because I found it difficult to wade through the information. Often there was just a lack of information. Plus being a product manager and ux designer, rather than an server admin, mean I have a slightly different perspective. So hopefully some of this is helpful to you, and saves you a headache.

The Goal

The goal was simple. I wanted to determine if after 2 years Linode was still the best host for me. What’s best for me? Well I know my way around the command line and can Google with the best of them, so I’m cool with no control panel. But I’m not a full time server admin, and have a kid that I want to give my time too, so stability is critical. I also put value in my personal brand and try to only do business with those that strengthen my brand. Lastly I wanted to feel like I was partnered with my webhost, not just a ticket number. Being active on the interwebs puts food on the table, so I’m in this for the long haul and need to know they are too.

I did some pre-quest research and had narrowed down the field to three contenders: Linode, Media Temple, and Rackspace. In many respects these are 3 very different companies, but that was the idea.

The Method

For each company I would be evaluating the same things:

Online knowledge base
Their forums
Phone/Email support
Alternative support (e.g. Twitter)
Reliability
Performance
Account Control Panel

So every host would get at minimum a call, email, and tweet from me. I would leverage Pingdom to test performance and uptime of at least 5 sites I knew where hosted by the company. Google would be my friend for the rest. Let’s see how they faired.

Rackspace – C

I’ll cut right to the chase, Rackspace was out 30 minutes after I started. I currently use Rackspace Cloudfiles as a CDN and it performs well as a CDN, but I hate it’s control panel. Their pricing is crazy complex and their knowledge base leaves much to be desired. I called to discuss Cloud Servers with one of their reps and was just completely turned off. Perhaps if your a business needing managed hosting, exchange, and CDN they are a good choice. Not for me, moving on.

Media Temple – B+

I really like Media Temple. I can’t tell you why I think that, maybe it’s because they were the first webhost I used way back in 2000. Bottom line is the marketer in me respects what they have done with their brand. They are the cool kids club and I want to be in their club.

Online knowledge base

They have one of the best knowledge bases you will ever come across. It’s well organized and written. I found it very easy to find information on. In fact often when googling how to do something on the server it was a Media Temple KB article that popped up. The knowledge base is extended further by the Community Wiki. While not officially supported I found it to be helpful. I’ve placed a dozen articles on Pinboard for future reference it’s just that good.

Forums, Phone, and Email

Skip it. Seriously. No offense to the people that earn a living here, but my call with (mt) sales was like calling Moviefone. Useless and annoying. Sorry, just my experience. I asked 9 questions was given spin for all but one. I am a product manager, I understand needing to maximize your strengths and downplay weaknesses. But 1 for 9 is rubbish.

Social Media

It’s odd to think the call I had with sales is the same company as the one I interacted with on Twitter. The people behind @mediatemple deserve huge praise. Post a question or make a comment and a super friendly person will respond almost immediately. As far as I am concerned this is their sales & support and they are damn good. I interacted with 4 people on Twitter and they were all great. I can’t stress this enough. If you are considering Media Temple just use Twitter, you’ll be much happier.

Reliability & Performance

I watched 5 sites I know are hosted on Media Temple for 30 days on Pingdom. One was even on the often discussed Grid. Rough math puts them at 99.8% uptime. There were several incidents displayed on the Media Temple status page during this period, but none so bad as to kill uptime. The transparency the status page provides is great. All hosts have problems, it’s nice to see them communicating.

Response times (including the Grid) averaged 240ms. I think this is important. Each of these sites will have been setup differently with a different admin keeping it going. That they averaged fast response times says a lot. Reliability and response times are not bad at all, on par with Rackspace.

Account Control Panel

I signed up for a (ve) account to play with the account center. It hasn’t changed much from back when I used them for shared and grid hosting, but it gets the job done. Adding domains is a little confusing, but you don’t do that often. The lite Plesk panel you get on the (ve) is nice. Nice not having to configure iptables firewall from the command line.

Overall

I really like Media Temple. They’ve got their image down, and everything they do exudes the Media Temple panache. You really do want to be part of the club, and their social media crew is just stellar. The one stop shop for hosting, CDN, and soon email is attractive. The user experience designer in me gets all excited about Media Temple’s design excellence and having the (mt) on my site. The product manager in me also has great respect for the transparency of the product team.

Linode – A

If Media Temple has all the marketing and experience design excellence, Linode has the technical excellence. Their website says it best:

"We're a VPS hosting company built upon one simple premise: provide the best possible tools and services to those that know what they need — better hosting."

Linode is not cool. They don’t really do social media, and they only have one type of hosting. But it is the best hosting you’ll come across.

Online knowledge base

Strictly in terms of content Linode and Media Temple are on par. I prefer the Media Temple’s design and found it easier to navigate. Linode’s is plain and simple, but it gets the job done efficiently.

Forums, Phone, and Email

A quick Google search will confirm what I am about to say. Linode’s forum’s and email support are incredible. Email’s are thoughtfully responded to in minutes more often than not. Not once did I feel like it was a copy & paste deal. Even more so though are the forums. You can pop into the forums anytime of day and experience a very active community. It’s the single best place I’ve found to get help. They they even help you if your not hosting with Linode. If social media is Media Temple’s go to communication, the forums are Linode’s.

Social Media

Linode does social media, but it’s not on the same level as Media Temple. Again it’s serviceable and efficient, but I don’t want to tweet with Linode the way I do with Media Temple.

Reliability & Performance

Pingdom says the average uptime of 5 sites for Linode this month, one in each data center but Fremont, is 100%. Prior to all the issues Linode had with HE in Fremont I had 300 days of 100% uptime. Then it all went to shit. Things appear to be stable again, but the lack of communication and action still stings.

On the performance front Linode is in a league of its on. Average response times were 80ms, the fastest being in the 20’s. Again these were sites run by different people. That kind of crazy fast performance across all of them says something. I don’t know what they do, but you will never get argument over how blindingly fast a Linode is.

Account Control Panel

Outstanding. Of the 3 hosts, Linode’s in-house account control is near perfect. Unlike other Linode features, this is actually well designed, not bad on the eyes in addition to being functional. I check the account graphs all the time, and the iPhone app is just as great.

Overall

Linode does one thing, but they do that one thing better than almost anyone. They don’t have the cool factor, variety of services, or human element of Rackspace and Media Temple. But neither of them come close to Linode in terms of technical excellence. Stackscripts also make deploying a fully functioning and secure server stupid easy.

A Concluding Twist

On more than one occasion I almost paid up for Media Temple and migrated my sites over. But I kept coming back to one thing. Media Temple is great and everything except being a webhost. They are just adequate at that. Linode is an exceptional webhost, and mediocre at everything else. The outages are frustrating. But every host has outages, and on the whole Linode doesn’t have them often. So I stayed with Linode.

If you need more than just web hosting Media Temple might be a better fit you. I would definitely recommend them over Rackspace. But if all you need is a webserver Linode is in a league of it’s own. Hopefully they can sort out Fremont soon.

The Apple He Built

2011-10-05 00:00:00 -0700

Steve Jobs loved Apple. He loved technology. He loved his wife and kids. He loved. He infected others with his passion and drive for excellence. Steve Jobs is an icon. Not just as a CEO, but as a person. As a CEO He could see the future. As a person he was a loving father and husband. Where would we be today without Steve Jobs and the Apple he built?

Apple’s Manifesto

He leaves us with a company built to continue changing the world for the better. In his memory let’s remember some the ideals He has built into Apple and strive to apply them whatever it is we do.

We believe that we’re on the face of the earth to make great products
We’re constantly focusing on innovating
We believe in the simple, not the complex
We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can focus on the few that are meaningful to us
We believe in deep collaboration and cross pollination in order to innovate in a way others cannot
We don’t settle for anything other than excellence
We have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change

What Steve means to me

The first computer I ever used was an Apple II. The first computer I bought with my own hard earned money was a bright blue iBook. I learned to design, program, burn playlists, and surf the web all on a Mac. There are currently 15 Apple products actively used in my home. We share our daughter smearing blueberries all over her face with family via Facetime. We caputre and share little events in life on our iPhones. I work 12 hours a day on Mac to support my family. Thank you Steve, you will be missed.

Difference of a Decade

2011-05-03 00:00:00 -0700

Like most Americans I remember September 11, 2001 with complete clarity. I was driving to my first class of the morning. My normal morning radio talk show had been replaced by live reports of what was happening at the WTC. I completed my commute glued to the radio, passively listening to the reports and feeling a giant knot in my throat. Classes were cancelled that day and Myself, and everyone I knew, sat glued to the TV for the next 72 hours as the country went on lock-down.

What a Difference a Decade Makes

Fast forward about a decade to the night Bin Laden was killed. I was glued not to the Radio, but to Twitter on my iPhone. I was not passively listening, but rather I was engaged in a global conversation. In fact, a guy live tweeted the whole thing going down. My wife and I didn’t turn on the TV for almost 12 hours. When we finally did turn on the TV we were met with news outlets desperately trying to fill the time with stale information. Everything they were saying we had already learned via Twitter and Facebook. Mashable asked their readers how they heard about Bin Laden’s death more than 50 percent heard it through Twitter or Facebook first. Twitter released a graph displaying a ramp up to 12.4 Million tweets per hour.

Let’s think about this for a moment. In 10 years time a not insignificant number of people have fundamentally changed how they keep up with breaking news. But it is more than just how we hear about news, its how we are now engaged in the news. TV and radio are largely consumption. Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk are largely engagement. We now actively participate in the transfer of information by retweeting and posting on walls. Our followers and friends are becoming the primary source of news.

Passive to Interactive

2011 is the tipping point for news going moving from a passive consumption to personal and interactive. Much or the information flowing out of the middle east is via social media. Our trusted news sources are increasingly becoming our social media connections. At the same time our distrust of traditional media outlets continues to grow. Twitter in particular has made news a conversation where people living the news can send out updates as it happens, and we can respond to them. This kind of real-time direct interaction on a global scale didn’t exist 10 years ago, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. That’s why I believe news has permanently changed, and we will increasingly default to interactive news sources over passive news sources.

What is Next

Those in tech know one thing for sure. 10 years is a lifetime for technology. Twitter is not new, but mature in tech years. This begs the question, how will news of big events be delivered 10 years from now? I think we will we see a swing back to curation (like today’s news) but with much greater interaction.

The Devil is in the details

2011-04-10 00:00:00 -0700

If you believe what Bill Buxton has been advocating, and for the record I do, we all need to be using state diagrams in conjunction with our static rapid prototypes and storyboards. He states the most important parts of any design, whether software or hardware, are the transitions. What happens when your UI changes from one state to the next? Is it smooth or abrupt? Do you give the user enough feedback so they know what is going on? More importantly, what does your user perceive of this? Between every one of your static pages there was some event or series of events that merge together to form a transition. The details of what happens in transitions can make or break your design.

Apparently Microsoft did not Get the Memo

Jeff Atwood discusses a real world example in his post about the new Microsoft Vista copy feature. In a nut shell, the new Vista copy feature has been completely overhauled. It is faster, less error prone, and more efficient. Everyone should be ecstatic, right? Nope, a quick Google search indicates most do not think the file copy is faster. To the average person the new file copy feature appears to be slower. You see, in Windows XP the progress bar indicates complete and disappears before the file has actually completed copying. In Vista the progress bar stays until completion, providing an accurate, real-time status for the user. There are also very valid technical reasons for this (read this post to learn more). On paper, everything makes sense and the end result should have been better for the end user. But if you were to compare how long the progress bar is displayed in XP to Vista, Vista appears to be slower. Paper says better, reality says worse. The bottom line, a better, much improved feature is now one more piece to the argument that Vista is a slow resource hog.

The Vista example is a great one because as much flak as Vista gets, it actually is a pretty good OS, and it is in fact better than XP. But to the end user it appears slow and bloated. I don’t know any of the programmers or designers that worked on Vista, but I am willing to bet that they did not do the work up front to define and test all of the transitions that occur.Imagine if they had used a couple of state diagrams when designing the copy feature. They could have tested display times, how fast the progress bar moved across, how long it should have been, etc. Before a single line of code had been written they could have defined exactly how the feature should have worked. And let’s all be honest with one another, code is a lot harder to change than a simple diagram.

It's Not About Features

2011-04-04 00:00:00 -0700

“Why don’t we have a feature matrix comparing our features to our competitors features?”

A few weeks back the new VP of Sales walked into my office on the war path and boldly made this statement. He proceeded to explain why a feature comparison matrix was mission critical for his account managers to be successful selling our application. When prospects would bring up a competitors application his team could use the matrix to quickly scan and rattle off all the features we had they didn’t. His case was that this rattling off of our unique features would seal the deal. I said no.

I had three reasons not to do fulfill his request for a competitive matrix.

Features rarely differentiate apps anymore
A complete list would drown you in data and be unusable
It fosters selling features and I want you to sell an total experience

The software industry is mature and yet still evolving at breakneck speed. Features are no longer enough. We need to understand the the complete package and sell an experience.

Our App is Not Unique

Our phenomenal new app concept that will transform the world? Yeah, its been done. Apples various App Stores have more than 100,000 apps combined. Sourceforge has 260,000 projects. My Twitter stream averages 5 tweets about new apps per day. I don’t dare estimate the number of apps that exist for Windows. The bottom line is with this many applications present in the market there is a very low probability that a given feature or set of features will be unique to our app. Our competitive matrix would show a lot of overlap and not be much use to the account managers trying to differentiate.

Oh sure, we can fudge it. Make it look unique by playing with the language. But this tactic assumes our prospects are ignorant enough to fall for it. Trouble is there is a high probability they are not ignorant and they have done their homework. So fudging comparisons just makes us look bad and likely cost the deal anyway.

But I need a quick way to see what we have!

So there are a lot of apps available and likely share features with our app. The pain is that we don’t have a quick way to compare our app to a given competitor. This means the matrix must contain as many competitors as possible to increase the probability that we can get the info we need when we need it. If a competitor comes up that is not on the matrix it will have failed providing us the information we needed. How large do you think a matrix covering core features and competitors features would be? Could we navigate it quickly while on the phone with a prospect? I don’t think we would have much success with that.

It’s About the Experience

You could walk into any coffee shop in the world and get a latte with vanilla flavor. You could make one at home with relative ease for that matter. So why do millions of people line up every morning to buy one from Starbucks? The Experience.

Starbucks took an ordinary feature set of coffee, espresso, mocha, and latte and packaged it into an experience that people desired. They gave funky names to small, medium, and large. They play just the right kind of music with chairs that fit the part under lights that make it feel cool. Then they deliver that experience consistently.

Apps are obviously more complex than coffee (well, for most) but we are still selling to people. We need to focus less on selling features and instead get people to experience our app. It’s the experience that will differentiate us and keep people lining up for more.

This of course assumes our app has a magical total experience, but that is another article…

A strong brand will not make you rich

2011-03-03 00:00:00 -0800

Strong Brand =! $$$

For the past three months I have been doing due diligence in preparation to start a user experience design consulting business. During that time I have been reading a lot about branding, how important it is to create a strong brand, and how to create said strong brand. This has all been very educational and very helpful. I clearly see how a strong brand plays a huge role in the success of a business and how it is perceived by the public. I started to think about all the companies that had established and strong brands, companies like Apple and Adobe and how well they perform. That is when I fell into the trap.

The Brand Trap

Apple is a hugely successful company with a powerful brand identity. However by comparison their bottom line is small beans when compared to Merck or Chevron. Both of those companies have revenues 20x that of Apple, but they have no brand identity. Case in point, can you name the company that makes your pain reliever? Bet you would be surprised it’s no Tylenol. More importantly, does it matter even matter? Like most people you probably switch between Aspirin, Tylenol, and whatever store brand based on cost & availability. You certainly don’t buy because it’s Tylenol. The same principal applies to gas, it is unlikely you buy Chevron because it is Chevron, but rather you buy because it is the cheapest and available.

The trap is to cannibalize your brand in search of revenue, spreading yourself so thin and stamping your logo on as many things as possible. This tactic might net you increased revenue in the short run, but over time your brand will become so diluted that you move from being an Apple into being a Chevron. When this happens you lose something much more valuable than money, you lose customer loyalty.

Loyalty is Royalty

So if a brand will not make you rich, why bother? Loyalty. A strong brand foster brand loyalty, something your customer can relate with and be a part of. When was the last time you say people lining up days in advance to get the latest gas formula from Chevron? But every product launch from Apple entices a fanboy and media frenzy for weeks. That frenzy is a direct product of a strong brand.

Even more important than media frenzy, loyalty makes it much more difficult for your competitors to draw your customers away. Once a customer has bought into your brand they think of themselves as a part of your business. They invest a part of themselves. If you continue to treat them right and give them a consistent experience with you, no amount of fancy advertising or discounts will draw them away from you. People complain about the Apple Tax, or the ticket prices for Disneyland, but they continually plop down the cash to interact with those companies. That is the effect of loyalty, created by a strong brand.

Avoiding the Trap

Avoiding the Brand Trap is easier than it might seem. When we set out to define and develop our brands, we need to make the indicator of the brands success loyalty, not revenue. There are countless books on how to increase revenue, how to squeeze more dollars out of each touch point, so there is no reason to dilute your brand to that end. The temptation will present its self regularly, but making it a business rule to only judge your brand by loyalty will help you maintain course. In the long run loyalty will make you rich.