Every day, I read dozens of articles about myriad different things. If they're particularly interesting, and if I manage to remember, I'll save them to this list. Warning: I'm not very good at remembering, but let's consider this one of my new year's resolutions.
I'm M. Jackson Wilkinson, a technologist, designer, speaker, educator, and writer in San Francisco. I'm the CEO and Founder of WeSprout, which is coming soon. I'm from Philadelphia, went to Bowdoin College in Maine, root for the Phillies, and love to sing.
ТУРНИКИ
A great post from Mike Montiero:
So as much as I’d like to just show you the greatest logo I’ve ever made for anyone (…and trust me, if Paul Rand himself saw it, he would realize he was merely the Pippen to my Jordan.) I’d like to be properly compensated for it. Because I put a lot of time and effort into it. And it’s how I earn my living.
And that time and effort was used to make sure I delivered something that actually met your needs and objectives. You guys have numbers to meet. (I imagine at least a 10% increase to last year’s $14.5B in revenue, and $967M in net income.) And plans for the future based on meeting those numbers. So do I.
That’s one side of the issue. The other side of the issue is that crowdsourcing design often doesn’t work. You can crowdsource opinions or small tasks, but crowdsourced creativity successes are the exception, not the norm.
Short summary: the Libyan government, which owns the .ly TLD, doesn’t want foreign and/or objectionable companies owning prime short .ly domains anymore, and has already banned a couple prominent ones without warning.
I was wondering when this bomb was going to drop. We’re affected by it at Posterous too, with our post.ly short domain.
If you’re building a business, you need to choose your partners carefully, especially when you’re going to need to depend on that partner. Bit.ly chose to partner with the Libyan government. Fortunately, at Posteorus, it’s not the world’s biggest dependence, but it’s something we’ll probably need to handle at some point.
If you’re the type who uses lorem ipsum content in your mockups, it might be worth considering some content with a bit more character. H.G. Wells, Herman Melville, and others contribute their public domain works to a pretty useful content generator.
It’s worth mentioning that filler content isn’t always the best approach. I personally try to use realistic content as often as possible these days, and chances are pretty good that your users won’t be producing the same content Melville would.
This would be even more useful for me if there were a decent API behind it.
Harry Brignull:
Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.
Use for good, or use for evil.
Really great explorations of technical and visual possibilities on the web, themed around the posters of World’s Fairs. Gorgeous and inspiring.
Found by Michael Angeles:
“If for any reason you are unwilling or unable to click the giant button, please email us…”
Gotta say, it pops and can’t be missed. DESIGN PATTERN.
The headline says it all: “Times loses almost 90% of online readership”
Hopefully they realize their error and make adjustments. But let’s not pull a Gruber here and call this “dumb.” It’s just an experiment, and online, these things are super valuable not only to the Times, but for the whole industry.
Let’s hope they experiment with a few other models and find one that ends up being successful. It might take a few more tries, but as long as they don’t get too invested in any one experiment, it doesn’t have to take too long to find a manageable model.
Adam Rifkin:
Put another way, Google designing social apps is like Microsoft designing iPod packaging.
Anything social by Google has been an abject failure, in my view. They’re just terrible at doing anything that doesn’t make Google better as a company. For most people at Google, life is 98% work, 2% sleep, and they design products with that lifestyle in mind.
Derek Sivers:
In the case of a hotel room: I had already reserved the room, planned my trip, and checked in before realizing they were going to force me to use their unique non-standard interface.
For you website designers: your design choices are like this light switch. Your users have already come to your site, now they’re forced to use your interface.
In my view, interaction design has almost nothing to do with art. The art that may occur on the web is graphic design. Unfortunately, many don’t know how to draw that line.
Make smart choices when it comes to the interactions. Make bold choices when it comes to the presentation of those interactions.
Yahoo has its own styleguide out, along with some great resources for writing content for the web.
It includes everything like basic web-friendly content advice (“Write strong headlines”) to the nuances of international grammar differences:
When referring to your own or another company, use the third-person singular pronouns it and its. In the United States, a company is treated as a collective noun and requires a singular verb and a singular pronoun. Referring to a company in the plural (they, them, their, theirs) is chiefly a British convention.
At least now I can cite a slightly less stuffy reference than ALA or Chicago.
Nice. Lots of sage wisdom encapsulated here. It’s certainly way more instructive and useful than the UPA’s “Designing the User Experience“ poster.
37 Signals:
I have to think (and experiment) every single time I want to decipher one of these keyboard “shortcuts”. Why is it that only the command key (⌘) actually has the symbol printed on the key itself? And what’s up with the symbol for the option key (⌥)?
Apple and usability usually go hand-in-hand, but the keyboard shortcuts are a huge exception. Why not just put them on the keyboard? Too ugly?
As reported by IW:
The “repetitive now” user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.
The “bored now” are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don’t offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.
The “urgent now” is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.
This definitely makes sense. In short: remember what people keep coming back for, constrain to location if they need something right away, and tailor to the medium.
Everything Android gets right are things the iPhone got right first and still does better. Every “unique to Android” feature seems, at best, a technological demo.
The fact that Android is open is probably a major part of the problem.
When you have to cater to almost any hardware stack, how do you really optimize for things like battery life? On some phones, the display is far less efficient than others. Some devices have the 4G modem as the top draw of power while others have a very efficient 3G modem.
How can you design software that integrates features into the whole system when only a small percentage of devices will have that feature in the first place?
Android ends up being a duct-tape solution to compete against the iPhone, and fails.
Open systems work really well when the audience consists solely of geeks, and when the solution focuses purely on technology. Beyond that, a closed system with good taste guiding it clearly produces better results.
Worst copy ever:
The SXSW PanelPicker is a two-step online system that allows the community to have a significant voice in programming Interactive, Film, and Music conference activities for SXSWeek 2011 (March 11-20).
Basically, if you know what is going to be of interest to the industry in just under a year or so, you should propose a talk.
That said, if you believe you qualify for the above, you’re probably:
I’m in that last category, but I’m hoping to meet a few from the second-to-last. I hear they have flying cars.
A soon-to-be classic from McSweeney’s:
Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.
From the guys who discovered the issue:
AT&T had plenty of time to inform the public before our disclosure. It was not done. Post-patch, disclosure should be immediate– within the hour. Days afterward is not acceptable. It is theoretically possible that in the span of a day (particularly after a hole was closed) that a criminal organization might decide to use an old dataset to exploit users before the users could be enlightened about the vulnerability.
Even in this disclosure, which I feel they would not have made if we hadn’t publicized this vulnerability, AT&T is being dishonest about the potential for harm.
I’m pretty sure I was impacted by this list the first time around, and it’s clear that AT&T doesn’t have a clue what they’re doing when it comes to the web, especially when it concerns security.
Dustin Curtis:
There has been a lot of discussion about the pixel density in iPhone 4’s Retina display, but most of those discussions are missing the point. The Retina display isn’t revolutionary because of pixel density — some Android phones have featured almost 300ppi for months. iPhone 4 is revolutionary because it has increased interface definition.
Yup. If you’re doing it right, you’re quickly finding yourself using the concept of a “pixel” less and less, especially on iOS devices.
Lots of juicy potential in this one, but as Adam Singer notes, it’s highly reliant on cross-browser implementation.
Fast Company is taking notice:
One of the things that excites people most about technology is that it is seen as a gateway to the future. So how does that explain the recent glut of lo-fi adverts, software, and user interfaces that seem to be being spewed out by so-called hi-tech companies?
Perhaps you’re knowingly nodding your head, too, with the recognition that no matter how high-tech a design solution may be, the best ones often start quite at the other side of the spectrum, with pencil and paper or simple boxes and arrows.
It’s nothing new, but definitely put in a current context. Hoy writes:
I’m not the first to write about this, and I won’t be the last. It’s 2010. I cannot for the life of me understand why so many smart restaurateurs (or the agents that work on their behalf) simply fall flat on their face when it comes to their online strategy. While I believe their intentions are genuine, many simply don’t understand the values of accessibility and usability. It frustrates the hell out of me - not so much as the president of a standards-based web design company, but as a human being.
+1
Why is Apple so controlling? Why do they have phones that are all nearly identical? Why do they have particular restrictions on background apps? It all comes down to battery life. Battery life is not just another feature on some specifications checklist. It is the driving philosophy behind every design decision made on the iPhone.
He suspects that Android will only develop more battery life issues, and things are already getting pretty bad.
Again, it’s all about balancing constraints. If you want to run seventeen apps at once, or play flash games, you have to expect you’ll get a couple hours out of your phone, max. Apple isn’t willing to create a device where consumers need to be charging their phones five times a day.
A good overview of what HTML5 provides, which browsers support which features, and a fairly even-handed comparison between Flash.
HTML5 is the new buzzword, following in the footsteps of “web 2.0,” but here’s to hoping we actually allow HTML5 as a term to keep some real meaning.
Khoi Vinh:
While the letterforms on that virtual page may look gorgeous, it’s apparent to any designer that the text is far from perfectly typeset. It’s hideous, scarred as it is by unsightly “rivers” of bad spacing within the text. No self-respecting typographer would dare call that perfect.
It really is a JV move of Apple. Jeff Croft suspects it could be related to the use of Webkit throughout the platform, but even that wouldn’t be an excuse for these kinds of mistakes.
The biggest issue one might have using the web on an iPad:
When I sat down to a redesign of the Gameplan admin interface I suddenly came to a realisation, :hover doesn’t work. It’s entirely possible I’d skim read this somewhere, but somehow the implications for my design work had passed me by until I saw an iPad in use.
For many, we often think about how many clicks a user goes through to complete a given interaction, and it somehow feels like the use of hover can alleviate part of that friction. If you care about the iPad or the similar copycat devices sure to appear before too long, that option is fading away quickly.
Of course, we can all take heart in the fact that well-done progressive disclosure is possible regardless of the number of clicks or taps involved. It’s about ensuring that every step in the interaction is clear and valuable more than it’s about fewer clicks.
It’s another one of those constraints that might make us all better designers.
The highlights:
From where I see it, Apple keeps pushing the bar further than the other manufacturers can reach. They’re working on making every feature feel like it’s always been there, spending a year or more on pieces like the retina display, and then the competition feels forced to slap together an answer in a couple months.
AT&T notwithstanding, the average consumer shouldn’t have much of a problem choosing this device over the myriad android phones.
The venerable Scott Adams:
You’d be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn’t succeed with the right execution. And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn’t fail if the execution were left to morons.
As of next Friday, I’ll be steering the UX and design efforts over at Posterous. That said, I’ve made a posterous site:
As anyone who even slightly knows me could tell you, I’m interested in myriad random topics. At the same time, my main site, Jounce, is pretty strictly centered on web-related topics — design, development, business, etc. So welcome to jackson.jounce.net, where I’ll be making shorter, more frequent posts on pretty much anything I find interesting.
If you’re interested in other topics and my take on them, do check it out.