UX Introspection: Will You Get Noticed in an Online Discussion?

Are you happy with all the online communities you have been to? What are your experiences? If you are a product designer, how would you improve or re-design such experiences?

The most frustrating experience, I assume, is when you have something of value to add to a discussion and yet, your voice, your contributions are drowned out amidst the din. You feel, "Nobody is listening." You feel you cannot catch up with the volume, the rhythm, the flow.

Online forums, discussions, conversations are not new shinny things any more. They have been in existence for decades. According to this Wiki entry, "Early web-based forums date back as far as 1994." And now we have dozens of such forums from  phpBB, vBulletin, myBB to SMF, Vanilla and bbPress.

If  a community is active and thriving, it is usually because of  the moderators, the elders, the statesmen,--- in other words, the people --- seldom because of the software.

I'm illustrating such a user experience below. Say this is Alberta, Canada, asking its provincial residents about their opinions of education. They all agreed in the end that the goals of a good education are : moral, entrepreneurial, and technological. Below, you can see that the wise Yoda's voice is as weighty as the voice of the whole province.

But will they hear it in this discussion? Will you also hear it? Will anyone even get the chance to hear it a few minutes after Yoda posted his comments?

1 Minute Later

Yoda Education students make moral, able to make a living easily, and fond of science and technology.

2 Minutes Later

Blah3 Obama?Yada yada yada. I love Romney. I love Ryan more. They will make the current economy crises go away.

Blah4 Obama had failed to create jobs. Though I love him still. The current economy crises will go away.

Blah3 I think good degrees get you good jobs. Given current economy crises. Huh

Blah2 Right, Blah1. what about humanities too? Plato, Shakespeare?

Blah1 what about religions? What about liberal arts?

Yoda I think education should make students moral, able to make a living easily, and fond of science and technology.

5 Minutes Later

Blah104 Blah blah blah is yses blah.Blah blah blah is yses blah

Blah105 Blah blah blah is yses blah.Blah blah blah is yses blah

Blah103 Blah blah blah is yses blah.Blah blah blah is yses blah

Blah102 Blah blah blah is yses blah.Blah blah blah is yses blah

Blah101 Blah blah blah is yses blah.Blah blah blah is yses blah

Blah3 Obama?Yada yada yada. I love Romney. Ilove Ryan more. They will make the current economy crises go away.

Blah4 Obama had failed to create jobs. Though I love him still. The current economy crises will go away.

Blah3 I think good degrees get you good jobs. Given current economy crises. Huh

Blah2 Right, Blah1. what about humanities too? Plato, Shakespeare?

Blah1 what about religions? What about liberal arts?

Yoda I think education should make students moral, able to make a living easily, and fond of science and technology.

10 Minutes Later

Blah104 Blah blah blah is yses blah.Blah blah blah is yses blah

Blah105 Blah blah blah is yses blah.Blah blah blah is yses blah

Blah1 what about religions? What about liberal arts?

Blah103 Blah blah blah is yses blah.Blah blah blah is yses blah

Blah1 what about religions? What about liberal arts?

Blah102 Blah blah blah is yses blah.Blah blah blah is yses blah

Blah101 Blah blah blah is yses blah.Blah blah blah is yses blah

Blah1 what about religions? What about liberal arts?

Blah1 what about religions? What about liberal arts?

Blah3 Obama?Yada yada yada. I love Romney. Ilove Ryan more. They will make the current economy crises go away.

Blah4 Obama had failed to create jobs. Though I love him still. The current economy crises will go away.

Blah3 I think good degrees get you good jobs. Given current economy crises. Huh

Blah2 Right, Blah1. what about humanities too? Plato, Shakespeare?

Blah1 what about religions? What about liberal arts?

View more comments/posts   <--- Yoda's wise insights buried here forever!

Yoda is no victim.

He won't complain, he won't suffer. He will just use his time more usefully, until our EthicMinds team designs a better discussion software.

Added: we solved this in  Product Strategy : Will You Get Noticed in an Online Discussion?

User Experience : An Online Forum I Love

Just as Ray Ozzie cannot forget his  Plato System, I still miss my NUS IVLE Forum. There are a number of reasons for my love. Here I just shoot off just what comes to my mind right now.

You Can Show Off 

You can show off your hard work, deep understanding, your popularity etc there.  T Harv Eker says, rich people or people who are getting rich don't mind sales or promotions targeting them. Good students and good professors enjoy other students or other profs showing off.

I enjoy that.

You Can Show Off but If You Bluff ...

I showed off a lot and got away with it most of times. But once .... 

I made some remarks about Enterprise Architecture or Integration. And a few days later, I got a 1-line question, polite but it exposed some leaks in my understanding of the topic. I dared not reply and rush to defensive arguments at once.

I rushed to the lib near the canteen near our SOC(School of Computing), at that time still near NUH. Hit a a few books on the topic and replied on the Forum.

A few hours later(this time, I was waiting for the reply anxiously), I got a 1-line question of the same nature and calibre. I hit a few more books and replied.

This went on  for about 1 more round, till I studied for about 2 or 3 whole days and replied well.

I enjoyed it, it made me learn really well.

You Can Bomb and Boost Your Grades

Out group made a presentation on our business plan in class. I was not doing the presentation, some other members were representing us. At the end of Q/A, a pair of students asked something like:  InfoSys or Tata will soon be doing something similar to what we were proposing to do. What will be our response?

I ran down from back of the lecture theater to the podium to answer. But the prof and the time keeper said our time was up.

I rushed to the computer lab and bombed the Forum, like

Questtion: How do we respond if InfoSys or Tata are doing XYZ?
Answer (1) : ... the answer ....

Questtion: How do we respond if InfoSys or Tata are doing XYZ?
Answer (2) : ... the answer ....

Questtion: How do we respond if InfoSys or Tata are doing XYZ?
Answer (3) : ... the answer ....

Questtion: How do we respond if InfoSys or Tata are doing XYZ?
Answer (4) : ... the answer ....

The answer are in rapid-fire style: 3 or 4 sentences of 8 or 10 words each.  Later I heard some group members remark that my Forum bombs had raised our group's grade 1 or 2 notches up.

I enjoy that.

Why Don't You Re-create that Atmosphere and Experience Somewhere?

I leave this for you, readers.

Usability, Readability: Applying Christina Wodtke to Steve Krug

A usable website is a readable website too.

Here, I'm going to apply some principles of information architecture to a chapter of a book on usability.

The usability book is Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, second edition. It's wonderful, near perfect. It'll change your website or web application design. I have  some issue only with Chapter 6: Navigation.

Even then, that Chapter is extremely good, and full of great, directly usable insights. Just the last section of the chapter covers more than the cost of the book. Because the chapter is important and extremely good, I want it to be more organized. Remember: a readable website is a rememberable website too.

Retention Problem with Chapter 6

After every chapter, I try to summarize my understanding with an A4. A good habit developed before reading McKinsey Mind, McKinsey Way.

With this chapter, I had difficulty organizing the notes into a coherent whole. For help,  I rushed to the Content, and found the cause of the problem here:

If you compare this with another content below, you see right away that Steve Krug used outline for the whole book but not for each or at least for this chapter.

The second book( Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web ) is about information architecture, the blueprint, the visible underpinning of your content so that reader/users won't feel lost easily.

The Solution I'd Suggest

Here, I'm not re-writing Steve Krug's chapter.  He also writes so well that even Ginny Redish may think twice to rewrite it wholesale. I'm just suggesting the likely hidden, invisible outline.

Chapter 6 : Navigation

  Search or Browse
  Search : Designing search boxes
  Global Navigation: Home page link, "You're Here",  Breadcrumbs, Tabs
  Local navigation : lower-level navigation tools, page name etc.
  Trunk Test:
         1. Site Id
         2.  Global Navigation ( top head bar )
         3. Page Name
         4.  Search
         5.  Local Navigation
         6.  Breadcrumbs

Thank you, Steve Krug, Wodtke, and Redish. I learn a lot from you.
Maybe this is no more than a mischievous schoolboy tactic: using one teacher's lesson in another's subject.

Programming - The Answer , My Friend, is ...

on August 11, 2011

My Own Failures

1. I wrote an application in a Ruby web framework 1.x.x. Everything worked, fine. Then the 2.x.x. version came along and I upgraded and my app broke in many places. I fixed them somehow.

Then the 3.x.x. version came along and I upgraded and my app broke in many places again.

That is not the framework's problem. The real problem is I had used too many plugins.

2. I wrote an application in a PHP web framework 1.6.x. Everything worked, fine. Then the 1.7.x. version came along and I upgraded and my app broke in many places.

This is not the framework's problem. The real problem is I had used too many PEAR's.

3. Before all this, I worked for a project that migrated from EJB1 to 2 to 3 etc.
And for another project, where the project managers took years to move from Struts 1 to 2.

Other Failures

1. Netscape's spaghetti code that cost the company its battle against Microsoft.
2. Friendster's social graph that slowed the site to a crawl.
3. MySpace's "technical debt" that ruined the site.
4. Ruby on Rails framework --- Its lack of hosting (Maybe their developers don't care or it is their blind spot). And its handling of data management; if they don't know this part well enough, they should leave it alone e.g. PHP has no ORM and has been doing just fine.
5. Microsoft alone has a dozen or more data access technologies from 1998 to 2008, according to a book by Joel Spolsky. I don't have time or experience to know such stuffs.

My Own Successes

1. Porting RedBlack tree, AA tree etc from Java to Ruby is easy.
2. Porting shortest path, quick sort etc from Ruby to Python is easy.
3. Porting Regular expressions, string/text handling etc from PHP and Perl to Ruby is easy.
4. Porting higher order functions amongst Perl, Python, Ruby is easy.
5. Porting any plain domain or business object from any language to any other language is very very easy. From Java to Pascal, from Perl to PHP, from Ruby to C++, whatever.

6. Modeling or making mental representations or doing objects, classes and APIs for Law domains, Insurance domains, Education domains are very very very easy and fast.

7. Dreaming, going into trance, seeing in my mind eyes some apps end to end from the users' point of views is extremely easy and fast. "Easy" doesn't mean I do these activities well because, often, I even forgot to do them at all!

8. Writing domain objects is very easy.

9. Combining those objects is very easy.

Other Successes

1. Real programmers code everything by themselves. A paradox because they do and they don't.
2. Real programmers don't trust others' codes. A paradox because they do and they don't.

3. Excel team wrote even their own compiler, and killed off all dependencies.
4. Algorithms are very infrequent. They come once or twice in a decade.

5. Facebook is using many programming languages. So is Twitter.
6. Google founders didn't learn HTML etc on purpose.

The answer

If you can't find Apple-style appealing packaging, sell your stuffs, your wares raw, plain, uncovered!

Have fun!

A Policy Game for Singapore

A Game from Silicon Valley

Please check out "Making Sense of the Games Politicians Play" in Bloomberg Businessweek, September3-9, 2012 issue, page-26-27.

Or this link or this link.

According to the Businessweek article, the computer game teaches the player about budgeting, trade-offs and compromise etc.

A Better Game to Come

We can design a better game, and we'll design it for free, too.

Here are lots of excellent programmers amongst Singapore's citizens, PRs, EPs etc. If even a handful of them feel any amount of love for this beautiful island, they will come and code the game.

Why this game is better:

1. dilemma vs problem, problem vs wicked problem, either/or trap, "doing both"
2. A quote I forget where I read first: "When given two bad options, good statesmen create better ones."
3. Feynman's famous quote form Wiki: "Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics." 
4. Trade-offs is a fact of life, a fact of physics. We cannot yet wilfully teleport ourselves to another planet or another parallel( or otherwise) universe where we get more than 24 hours a day, not yet. Still, we need to reduce (1) the frequency/number of times we play and (2) the duration of the time we play trade-off game.

Why not an option-generation game?

The kind of game young (Mr) Sim Wong Hoo played (a poly grad , they told him, had no right to design a new sound card) ...

The kind of game young (Mr) Lee Kuan Yew played (a third-world country, they believed, must become a second-world country before becoming a first-world country).

Product Strategy and UX: Genius Design - Part 1 of 10

Designing for Interaction: An Interview with Dan Saffer has someting to say about genius design.
Dan Saffer is a senior interaction designer at Adaptive Path and has authored Designing for Interaction .

Each of the approaches has produced great products over the years, and perhaps none more so (because it is used the most often) than what I call “genius design.” Genius design is when the designer relies on his or her own experience and skill to design, without any input from users. It's done by designers who either don't have the resources or the inclination or temperament to do research. Too often, it is practiced by inexperienced designers with little skill, but it can and has been used by many designers to create impressive things. Reportedly, the iPod was made with no user research, for example.
 

I'm not disparaging Jobs' achievements. But iPod did not look to me very "genius."

1. Steve Jobs had Walkman as his predecessor.
2. He waited for so long for iPod till the technologies for the components became small enough, light enough, affordable enough, etc.

Then what about Walkman and Akio Morita? How come he was so confident of its success that he defied his own marketing department? No focus groups, no market research, no user research, no user experience design ... Mr Morita must be a super genius?

1. He noticed that every time his daughter came back from her Uni/college, she went upstairs first to play her music, then came back down to greet her grandmother.
2. He noticed in US and European parks and streets many people carrying heavy radios for music. 
3. He noticed in his own lab rooms engineers listening to loud music, and in another room engineers working on very small radio/music-playing equipments. Does it remind you of Walt Disney, another famous bumble bee good at cross-pollination of ideas? If you were in Morita's place, would you also add one and one and see three or four?

I still have many more stories and many more theories about genius designs. See you.

UX Introspection : Would it Take Too Long to Build Reputation in an Online Forum?

The answer is: "Yes, it will take not only time but also a great amount of patience and understanding to establish your reputation in a 'democratic' online discussion."

Unless you pull off some stunts, or share your family jewels, or rig the game in your favor.

No  current reputation systems, rewards systems, badges systems, vote systems, poll systems won't help you.

As in my previous posts, I'll illustrate this point with a fictitious discussion with badges and votes systems. Excuse me if the example looks like your favourite forum/discussion. No deliberate intention here.

StackUnderwhelmed Forum

Question: When does an interaction fail to be interactive?
Vote : -1   Answer: I got this from Chris Crawford.
                 He postulates that a good interaction resembles a good conversation, and that a good
                 conversation has the 3 essential attributes, which I will explain in the example below.
                 He says a good interactive participant "listens," "thinks" and responds within a
                 reasonable interval.

1. A person/app just listens. Then, it is not interactive e.g. recorder, book, wall
2. A person/app just talks. Then, it is not interactive e.g. radio, old time TV, old time cd player
3. A person/app just talks and listens but without any thinking. e.g. some answering machine, some social bore

                           by Yoda 11 September 2012

Vote : 321         Answer: Interaction Design: How it works after I touch it.
                           interaction design (none specific to field) - concept/understanding how
                           one/individual interacts with an entity and how to design the process of
                           interaction of that individual with the entity. that entity can be anything you
                           pick it to be, for example your car, or your toaster, web browser and website
                           that you view in a browser

                       by Mogoda 11 September 2012

Who rated Yoda? A panel of well-regarded judges?

Who voted up Mogoda? No rigging, no gaming the system?

Entropy? Ageing? Gathering gross? A tree rotten inside? A better-than-nothing solution.

We should be able to do better now: we have experience and we can do without "legacy shit."

New Software Product Development --- My Proofs - Part 1 of 100

A Hot Web Application

I happened to read a recent Life Hacker book and browsing its pages, found the following app.

Don't Break the Chain

The site describes the app as follows:

This is based upon a motivation technique purportedly used by Jerry Seinfeld. Read about it here. The Short Version:

1. Pick a goal.
2. Mark off the days on which you work toward that goal.
3. Use your chain of marked off days as a motivator.

You can read more about its inspiration at Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret and at Don’t Break the Chain - Jerry Seinfeld's Method for Creative Success

There are apps for different platforms too:  IPhone App ,  IPhone and iPad apps .

My Intent

The fact is I've watched all the 9 seasons of Jerry Seinfeld for a couple of times. So has my son.

1. I can get about 10 more apps from Seinfeld character.
2. I can get about 10 more apps from George Costanza character.
3. I can get about 10 more apps from Kramer character.
4. I can get about 5 more apps from Elaine Benes character.
5. I can get about 5 more apps from Newman character
6. and so on.

Maybe my son has some more apps different from mine.

1. And what about Charlie Chaplin?
2. And what about Buster Keaton ?
3. And what about Fatty Arbuckle?
4. And what about Jim Carrey?

And for that matter:

1. What about Clint Eastwood?
2. And what about Kung Fu series?
3. And what about Bond movies?
4. And what about Jackie Chan?
5. And what about ... ?
6. And what about ... ?
7. And what about ... ?

Such apps are small and therefore won't take too long to code.

If you have some time to spare, we want you to work with us.

Of course, we won't spend the rest of our life doing such small apps.

But before we do the next Google, the next Facebook, the next salesforce.com ... Insert any big and famous name here ... we want you to work with us.

User Experience and Product Development : Dreamer, Wisher Method --- Part 1

In a previous post, I have demonstrated how I am good at dreaming and my Walter Mitty- Dijkstra hybrid mode.

I think I am alright dreaming how a user would go through an imaginary application.

A few weeks back, I asked an online Singaporean programmers group to implement some features for an e-learning app. They responded saying my  feature cannot be "new." Then, I showed how "new" they could be, by asking this:

"OK. Find me something that looks like this.

It's free and online. 
I type main question, then choices, including if necessary, images too. 
 And the answer.
I can add as many question I like. 
I can print it out, and it comes out nicely. 
I can let my students practice there. 
There can be tip/hints for students. 
Answers are graded. 
I can edit them. 
I can download my question sets. They work offline too! 
I can go on, but this should be enough. 


This is 1 of 1000 things we can do for education/training etc. So I have 

no need to protect this. ...

Please don't mention SCORM, IMS, Moodle, Atutor, Coursera, hot potatoes, 

whatever.

If a nice thing is there, why would I code or ask others to code."

Yes, I have dreamed up dozens of apps. Each app can be divided up into dozen smaller apps.

Therefore, there is no need for me to protect, hide, hoard each micro/nano app.

I am willing share these dreams to willing hands and kindred spirits.

User Experience: How to Improve Singapore Press Holdings's Advertising Calculator

We're solving that problem today from the viewpoint of user experience. Since this is a tatical detail, we won't discuss product strategy at all in this post.

Task 1 : I want to calculate the cost of this ad in text-only format.















Task 2 : I want to calculate the cost of this ad in "customized text plus some pictures" format. It means that I 'll use some different fonts and typographical variations and that I'll add some images somewhere inside.

How The Calculator Works Now

Step 1 : Select the Advertisement Category

  








Step 2 : Select the Publication

Step 3 : Click on Calendar to select Publication Date(s)

Step 4 :Select the Advertisement Type

Step 5 : Select the Advertisement Size

 










Step 6 : See Results

Solution for Task 1

Here we should use a text box. User copies and pastes her text/copy into the box, and our software counts characters, words, lines, width and height of the whole text/paragraph. Then, we gives estimate costs to user.

Solution for Task 2

Here, we should allow user to upload her ad copy as an image as in Facebook, Flickr etc. Then, our software will calculate its width, height and the estimate costs.

Basic image sizing, re-sizing are familiar to most programmers --- Imagick, Rmagick, PIL(Python Image Library), many PHP libraries and frameworks.

Humility

We know it takes many persons to change a light bulb at a company at Microsoft's level. You have many users so you must take extra special care not to break anything by your fix/enhancement.

I point this out just as an exercise and a reminder for future developments.

And I do notice that SPH has many other mechanisms and procedures to handle these problems very satisfactorily e.g. staffs at ads section can do this calculation for you. Maybe more cool alternatives that I may still be unaware of.

Product Development Exercise: Singapore Press Holdings Ad-cost Calculator

Underlying Principle

Tom Peters has suggested that we hone our design skills and design sensibilities by going shopping for under $10 and by learning do's and dont's from the things we've bought. Later, we'll refer to this as $10-design-learning activity.

Today Lesson

Today, we are going to learn from Singapore Press Holdings Ad-cost Calculator. Your task is to calculate cost for the following ad:

                          World Class

 As a software company,
    Do you want
    --- new product ideas?
    --- delightful user experience?
    --- outside developers grateful for your platform/APIs well-designed?
    --- a new leash of life for your current products?

                   More details at EthicMinds blog.

 Kyaw Kyaw Naing/ George
 B.A.(Hons, First Class), M.A., M.Comp.(Computing)
 time.proven.works@gmail.com


 

Tasks Hidden in Sub-Layers

I repeat: "Your task is to calculate cost for the following ad." This is not a straightforward task; nothing seldom is in web apps world.

To calculate the cost, you need to be clear about

1.   What category of ad you are placing (Well done, the site handles this excellently.)
2. In which paper (Well done, the site handles this excellently.)
3. What Publication Date(s) (Well done, the site handles this excellently.)
4. What Advertisement Type (Well done, the site handles this excellently.) That is, Run-On, Semi-Display, or Display.
5. What size you want (Well, is this done?)

Solutions from My Weaknesses

Once a friend asked me in the 80s: "Do you know some martial arts?"
Me: "I 've studied 7 martial arts in 7 days each."
My friend, being a very smart person, stopped asking about martial arts.

Now, I know programming the way I know Wing Chun, Brazilian Jujitsu, Krav Marga, Kung Fu, Karate, Judo, Muay Thai, Bando, Kendo, Kempo, Cilat, Akido etc.

This calls for a WYSIWYG/visual editor,such as CKEDIT/TinyMce, or some other in-house versions, like the ones Facebook and Google are using.

Personally, I've seen it implemented in a Javascript book I read in Jurong East library, a red cover, published 3 or 4 years ago.

Personally, I've tested TinyMce with Ruby on Rails, PHP(codeIgniter) and Python(Django). I believe it will be fine with Perl, ASP.NET or Strut/Spring/plain JSP too.

Solutions from My Non-Weaknesses

I'm closing my eyes to see and inducing myself into what I call Walter Mitty- Dijkstra hybrid mode.

Dreaming wildly but not so in the clouds as an astronaut architect. ("The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try.") Dijkstra, on the other hand, always remembers that humans(he included) have small heads.

What do I see in my dream?

What do you see in your dream? What use cases, what user stories, what scenarios, what happy paths, what unhappy paths, what fault trees ?

What do I see in my dream? 
(Note: The following is written in dream-speak.)

There is a box where I can type in, what they call "text editor" in HTML.

There, I copy my ad's copy and paste it there. I can place a few images among the text as well. It can be drag and drop. Or I upload some images. Or I can choose images from a given list somewhere alongside the box. ....

When I finish arrangement, I click a button named something like "Preview." And I see my ad amongst some other typical-looking ads.

There I see how my ad will look like: Is it noticeable? Does it look cluttered? Too small? Too narrow or broad? Or is it too expensive? I close the Preview page and change my ad again: more words or fewer words, more pictures or fewer. bigger fonts or smaller.

  Do I need a border, a thick one or thin, a plain one or colored?2x3cm pic or 3x2 cm?

Edit -> Preview-> Re-edit ... till Save cycle goes on

After a few minutes, anyone can formalize this dream into a spec. (If you still need more help, email me for FREE help.)


Added : We solved this UX problem in a later post.

Product Strategy and UX: Admiration: the Bump iPhone App

In a recent FastCompany's Article, we read this:

Consider Bump, an app that lets users swap data between phones simply by bumping them together. Its cofounder, Dave Lieb, notes that in the first dotcom rush, online enterprises had to build their infrastructures from scratch, so engineers were paramount. In our app economy, everything has changed. Bump had 1 million users before it spent $1,000. It didn’t need infrastructure, thanks to Amazon’s server-hosting service; it didn’t need advertising because of social media; and the App Store solved any distribution problem. Development was a breeze, too, because of Apple’s software developer kit. "These are all things that used to cost millions," Lieb says.

That is profound. It should open our eyes as well as our minds.

Yes, there are caveats:

1. We are not headquartered in America.
2. We have missed that wave.

Then, there are counter arguments:

1. There are customers outside America, too.
2. Missing one wave is no big deal. There are new waves almost every month or year.

Can we build an app like that outside America too? In places near where I'm living?
And I also read that mix/matching API's can be easy too:

For our geo-search API, we used PostgreSQL for many months, but once our Media entries were sharded, moved over to using Apache Solr. It has a simple JSON interface, so as far as our application is concerned, it’s just another API to consume.

HopeHero's Offer

If you want some "bump ideas", we can help.
If you have ideas already, but you want help with UX/UI/content/copy writing,  then we can help too.

Whatever role, level, pecking order --- we are willing to play, to help.

All we ask is: don't pay us in cash or salary.

Am I asking too much?