Business / Writing — 1 comment — Short URL
29
May 10

Text Playlist

Inspired by Frank Chimero and Liz Danzico, I’ve decided to share my own text playlist. These are a collection of articles I make time to read every month to inspire me and to make me think. These articles keep me on the right track as I inevitably get thrown off course.

They’re separated into three categories: business, life, and how I work.

Business

Why I gave away my company to charity

Two friends were at a party held at the mansion of a billionaire. One said, “Wow! Look at this place! This guy has everything!” The other said, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have: enough.”

I always make sure to read this article first because it helps me think about having enough. Right now, I constantly imagine how my life could be better. I could have a nicer car or a bigger laptop screen or a family of my own. Through storytelling, Derek reminds me that there is more to life than things and wanting more. I’m always wanting more, but I will someday be completely happy with everything I have.

Profitable and proud: Campaign Monitor

While the financial success has been great, there are other aspects of the business that I would consider more of a success personally. I genuinely still love what I do. I work with interesting, funny people. My wife and I are expecting our first child soon and I can work the hours I want. For me these things are much better indicators of a successful business than anything on a spreadsheet.

I do what I do to make money. That’s how I gauge my success, but that isn’t my end goal. The end goal is my happiness and money is just one thing that contributes to that. You couldn’t beg me to take a $250,000 a year job if I wasn’t going to love what I was doing. Too many people chase a paycheck and realize too late that there is more to life than that piece of paper you get every two weeks. Dave from Campaign Monitor helps me understand that money isn’t the only thing that will determine how successful I am.

Life

Making the Clackity Noise

Tell me something that happened. Use the names of people you’d forgotten about, and say what you’d thought would happen but didn’t. Write down what part of the song was playing when you slammed the door only to realize you had to go back inside for your car keys. Can you remember when you were still little enough to hide under the kitchen sink where it smelled like ammonia and Comet and old sponges? What was the color of the clunky old car your Dad would let you help steer. What brand did he smoke?

Merlin never ceases to inspire me as a writer. If I’m down to earth, he’s slightly below that. The best writing I seem to do is when I sit down at the computer and type. I write about whatever I’m thinking at the moment. Most of it is crap, but the good parts always float to the top.

That’s how I won a $1,500 scholarship for school. I had to write a two-page essay about what we wanted to do in life. So I just sat outside one day with my laptop and started typing. I typed for 20 minutes, proofread it for another 10 and handed it in. My professor who picked the winners said it was some of the best writing he’s ever seen. That’s the last time I make an outline for a 5-paragraph essay like they beat into my head in high school. From now on, I’ll just tell a story.

I need to make that clackity noise more often.

Life is Beautiful

This tune we’re too busy to hear will not be played again. Never forget to be thankful for your life.

It’s something we hear thousands of times, but it’s something that too many people forget in the daily hustle. They get distracted by what direction their career is headed instead of enjoying the simple, meaningful things like family and friendship.

I’m guilty of this as well. I convince myself that I’ll only be this busy until I save up more money and then I can carry on. It’s only temporary, right? I’m still wrestling with the line between work and life. Work is winning right now, but I’m determined not to let that rule my short time doing the “proton dance.”

How I work

Playing is Serious

Fooling around is serious stuff, whether it’s for the sake of our work or for the sake of our sanity. Don’t get me wrong: design can be serious stuff, and every professional has the right to take their craft seriously. But, somewhere in the myriad of analysis and tight deadlines, we’ve revoked our permission to play around with ideas and experiment.

And that’s unfortunate. Everyone needs a sandbox, somewhere they can try out new ideas without any consequences. I haven’t discovered how I play best and maybe that’s not what playing is about. Maybe I shouldn’t be trying to optimize my play-to-work ratio. Maybe play can be more productive and improve my real work in the long run.

Better

The things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks – empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.

Funny how all this social media makes me more anti-social. I’d rather Facebook message someone I haven’t talked to in a while than give them a call or meet them for coffee. I talk to people on Twitter who I’ve never met in person and sometimes I enjoy that more than talking to a friend I haven’t seen in a while. Maybe I need to go on a digital diet.

Hey speedy, slow yourself down

I needed to set a new pace. I need to balance the quality with the quantity. I need to say NO to projects, time lines and budgets. I need to pay attention to the details and prevent stupid mistakes.

I’m going through the same thing Kyle went through. I’m concentrating on being efficient and productive, but I give very little thought to actually making something I’m proud of. I haven’t updated my portfolio in a while for a reason.

I have recently been sacrificing quality under the pressure of deadlines and project budgets.

But my current project is going to be my best yet. How am I going to make it the best? Magic probably. Or I’ll take my time to go over every little design element and HTML tag to make it the best that it can be. I know I can do better.

10 Ideas in January

Be picky in work relationships. Realize that agreeing to unfair circumstances not only hurts you, but your peers as well, because it pushes what is acceptable behavior in the wrong direction.

I need to learn how to say no. I rarely turn down a project because I always think it’s going to be my last offer. I’m stuffing my stomach with every last bit of work in case there’s nothing else left to eat.

At least that’s what I tell myself. Really my project opportunities have never been better, and with my constant hunger for learning, they’re only going to keep getting better. I’m beginning to get used to that feeling.

De-optimizing

What if my bookmarks were hard to get to? What if I stripped all the links out of the article I’m reading? What if I had to solve an algebra problem before jumping into Google Reader? Would I go? What if every time I turned on my TV, it told me that the average American spends 2 months watching television per year? Would I watch?

What if I could only check Twitter once a week? What if I couldn’t eat dessert before eating all my vegetables? What if I didn’t have internet for a day? Smells like freedom to me and I’d like to give that a shot.


Stay up to date with my text playlist with the RSS feed. I’d love to see your text playlist.

Writing — 1 comment — Short URL
05
May 10

What Is Curating?

Curating has become a buzzword, but what does it really mean? It seems like everyone is curating now. People are curating great websites. They are curating stories. They are curating articles and now curating tweets.

In my mind, curating goes beyond a collection of great things. Curating is picking the best of the best after well thought-out deliberation. It isn’t just letting anything acceptable climb the imaginary wall of greatness.

Curating is separating the art from the noise: cherry-picking the stuff that really matters out of an endless stream of blah. And that art can be anything. A website. A tweet. Anything a human is responsible for making can be art, but it isn’t considered art by default.

Design — 3 comments — Short URL
07
Apr 10

Design for Invisibility

I strive for one thing when I design an interface:

Invisibility

I don’t want my users thinking about the drop shadow or border on a button. I don’t want them saying “that is good use of whitespace.” I don’t want them to get distracted by the many colors I’ve used to indicate the status of something. I want them to get stuff done.

I want the interface to be so usable that the interface actually disappears. It’s only the person using it and what they’re working on. The interface and any technology in between becomes transparent.

Example Time

Apple's iPad

The Apple iPad is a perfect example of this. When Apple was designing the hardware, they could’ve put more than one button on the front. One for the volume, arrow keys, a keyboard button. But they didn’t.

The lack of buttons helps the iPad’s owners concentrate more on the actual screen: the place where they actually get stuff done. This is where the software subtley kicks in. Every gesture, from pinching to zoom to swiping to scroll, is intuitive. People who have never picked up an iPhone or iPad in their lives can figure it out in a few minutes.

And after those few minutes, the interface and the tablet completely disappear. The only thing that’s left is the person and what they’re doing.

Business — 1 comment — Short URL
26
Mar 10

The Value of Failure

In REWORK, the authors Jason and David talk about how learning from failure in business is overrated. They cite a New York Times article about how venture-backed companies led by a winning entrepreneur are more likely to succeed.

Already-successful entrepreneurs were far more likely to succeed again: their success rate for later venture-backed companies was 34 percent. But entrepreneurs whose companies had been liquidated or gone bankrupt had almost the same follow-on success rate as the first-timers: 23 percent.

Failing can teach you an important lesson when you’re running a business, but success is a better teacher (and not to mention more fun). Failing teaches you only what not to do, what to avoid. If you study your successes and come across the same situation, you’ll know exactly what to do.

“Fail early and fail often” is a phrase I often hear repeated and one I’ve come to dislike. Failing causes pain and the human condition is to avoid pain in the future. When you burn your hand, you learn not to touch the hot fire. You don’t start out building the fire by saying “okay, I’m going to touch the hot fire so I learn what not to do in the future.” You do your best to avoid the fire altogether.

Failing is different than making mistakes. No business journey will be mistake-free. You learn from your mistakes and constantly readjust. I don’t consider those little errors failures.

When I run a business, I keep my eye on the prize (profitability). If I worried about the odds against me or every possible reason I could fail, I’d never get anything done.

Design / Shorties — 5 comments — Short URL
08
Mar 10

Better Helvetica Font Stack

Helvetica is easily my favorite font, but it has one downside: it looks like crap on Windows. The way Windows handles the rendering of Helvetica makes a great font almost unreadable at small sizes.

The problem is halfway solved by using the following CSS font stack:

font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

The problem is a fairly large percentage of PC users (including those who have installed any Adobe Creative Suite product) will still see Helvetica rendered horribly. I’m all for serving up a design that uses advanced CSS3 and leaving IE in the dust, but the main font being unreadable on the world’s largest operating system is unacceptable.

My Solution

I experimented with JavaScript that targets Windows computers and applies a certain class to the body of the page so I can target certain CSS styles and font stacks to a PC. I ended up with a mess of duplicated CSS code, and I don’t like to repeat myself. The best solution I came up with was the simplest one.

Use this font stack:

font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif;

Here’s what font will be displayed on each operating system:

Chart describing what percentage of PC users will see Helvetica Neue instead of Arial (1.4%)

Font percentages thanks to Codestyle.org

Macs will display an improved version of Helvetica and the small percentage that doesn’t have that will see Arial, which looks almost the same when rendered on an Apple.

A small percentage of Windows users will see Helvetica Neue and the rest will see Arial, which is good enough in my book. I like Helvetica better, but Arial isn’t the end of the world.

By narrowing down the font stack to target a specific variant of Helvetica font mostly on Macs, I am able to use Helvetica in my designs without worrying about how the font renders (or doesn’t render) on a PC.

Design — No comments — Short URL
24
Feb 10

Don’t Startle the Users

UI Guideline: If your users aren’t expecting something to pop up when they’re moving their mouse around, try not to scare them.

Inc magazine’s “Share” button is the perfect example of what not to do. At the bottom of an article, accidentally mousing over the button will make a [useless] box pop up instantly. This should be delayed at least 2/10s of a second, more or less depending on how technical and quick your audience is with a mouse. This can be accomplished with a JavaScript delay.

The problem with the share button goes beyond that. If the button is near the bottom of my physical screen, the box will pop up over the next page link, effectively blocking me from reading the rest of the article and trying to get me to pimp their article.

But maybe that’s what Inc wanted to happen…

Writing — 1 comment — Short URL
17
Feb 10

Dictionary Definitions Don’t Count as an Intro

Imagine the introduction of your writing as a funnel for readers to get into your subject. Start general and get more specific once they’re interested.

If you’re writing about web application usability to people who might not understand what that means, the dictionary definition isn’t going to help them. It may be right, but it isn’t useful.

Instead explain it in your own words to ease your reader into the topic. Eliminate jargon like “accessibility” and “user personas” to get down to the basics. All the sexy buzz words come later.

Copying and pasting a definition is the lazy way out. Think about how you would explain it to someone who has no idea what you’re talking about and use that as your introduction.

Design — 10 comments — Short URL
10
Feb 10

De-emphasize User Interface Controls

Help people focus on the content by designing your application UI as a subtle frame for the information they’re interested in. Downplay application controls by minimizing their number and prominence. Consider creating custom controls that subtly integrate with your application’s graphical style. In this way, controls are discoverable, but not too conspicuous.

— iPad Human Interface Guidelines

Every gradient you add to your interface makes it harder to use. The same goes for every drop shadow, rounded corner, background color, and button style. Don’t just add them because they look pretty.

This guideline should apply to every interface you work on. Design your interface to be as invisible as possible. Your users don’t want a sexy button style; they want the action that button performs. The action that hides behind that button is more important than how the button looks. Your content is what they want; not the text-shadow or background color.

Drop shadows, rounded corners, and gradients should exist to subtly increase the attractiveness of your interface, which can make it easier to use. A faint drop shadow under a button can subconsciously drive your user’s eyes to the apparently 3D button. Use these sparingly. Every button on your page shouldn’t be competing for the same attention. Emphasizing everything means nothing gets emphasized.

Pick which action or content is most important and emphasize only that, and do so with subtle effects.

Business — 3 comments — Short URL
03
Feb 10

Creating Jobs

The Economist is a magazine that goes into great depth about government and economic issues. I was surprised to see Steve Jobs on the cover, rather than Obama, considering both of their recent public presentations.

It got me thinking:

Who has done more to create jobs and improve the economy? Barack Obama or Steve Jobs.

Barack Obama has an $800,000,000,000 stimulus package to hire workers. This creates “work” but it doesn’t create “jobs.” As soon as that money disappears, so do the jobs. Should the government really be worrying about creating jobs, or should they be governing in such a way that they allow entrepreneurs to do the creating?

Steve Jobs has iTunes, Mac computers, the iPhone and the new iPad on his resumé. These products create jobs for the sellers and distributors of these electronics. As a byproduct, they’ve also created an ecosystem of job opportunities behind it. How many people have created their own jobs making iPhone apps? How many independent musicians make a comfortable living selling their songs on iTunes? How many designers are more creative and effective because of what is possible with web apps for the iPhone and iPad?

It’s not the government’s duty to “create” jobs. The taxpaying masses shouldn’t be the ones paying the bill for these few government workers. The government should get its hands out of the pie and let innovators like Steve Jobs do the job creating by making kick ass products that people actually want to buy. The government does a good job of providing a common defense and law enforcement, but it’s horribly inefficient at creating jobs.

Shorties — 1 comment — Short URL
27
Jan 10

iPad vs. Kindle

While it’s fresh on everyone’s mind, I guess I’ll give in to the power of Apple buzz and write about the iPad. I’m excited for its potential as a biggie-sized iPhone, but as far as an ebook reader, I’m not that impressed.

Kid on christmas morning

I was anxious last night because I knew today could have been the day where Apple changed the ebook and publishing business forever. I looked forward to 1pm all day and the 6 hours before that couldn’t go by quick enough. I had hopes that the iPad would be some kind of e-ink, HD-color display hybrid that would make me immediately regret buying a Kindle. I’m relieved and disappointed at the same time.

Relieved that my Kindle isn’t obsolete 3 weeks after I bought it.

Disappointed that reading on an iPad will give me few benefits over reading on a laptop screen.

Kindle vs. iPad – Fight to the death only on Pay-Per-View

Elliot Jay Stocks said that ”the fact that it [the iPad] is going to kill the Kindle is now obvious.” I disagree with him. I bought the Kindle for its e-ink and open hard drive (I can put whatever I want on it). The iPad doesn’t challenge either of those so I think the Kindle will be fine. The iPad will be nothing but a bump in the road for Mr. Bezos.

The iPad will be more convenient to hold while I’m reading an ebook than my laptop because of the absence of the weird CPU/keyboard thing dangling off my laptop. The glowing backlit screen will be harsh on my eyes after 45 minutes of pure reading. I see myself reading on the iPad occasionally, but I bought the Kindle for a couple specific needs and the iPad doesn’t satisfy either of those.

I didn’t buy the Kindle to play games or check my email. That’s what my iPad will be for :-)

Business — 6 comments — Short URL
20
Jan 10

Web Apps I Use Daily

In response to @drawar, I thought I’d share a bit about how I work. I plan on being more open in the future, but this is all you get for now.

These are the web apps I use on a daily basis to manage my web design projects and further my design knowledge.

Instapaper

Instapaper is listed first because I do a lot of reading, and much of it isn’t from books. Keeping up to date with web standards requires almost constant reading and Instapaper makes that much easier to manage. Whenever I visit an article I want to read, I click the “Read later” bookmarklet and it goes to my Instapaper account. I’ll read the articles from there in bursts every couple days. Recently, I’ve been reading the articles (and saving notes on them) on my Kindle and Marco’s new Kindle formatting is a life saver. If I had to choose one web app to take with me to a deserted island, it would be Instapaper.

Gmail

I’ve actually gone so far as to completely replace my desktop application with Gmail. When I used Mail, I found myself checking my email too often. Moving to a web app has helped this because typing in “gmail.com” in a new browser tab is enough of a barrier to stop me from checking it obsessively. Three years I’ve been using Gmail and I’ve never once had an “emergency email” (despite the numerous emails with that in the subject). It took that simple step to make me realize that.

Notable

Notable is an app for getting feedback from my clients on designs I do. Instead of using email to try to describe what needs changed, the client can make corrections and leave feedback right on the design. To see it in action, check out ZURB’s CNN redesign.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks handles all my billing and invoicing. I don’t particularly enjoy that part of my business and FreshBooks makes it super easy to put out of my mind. It does its job well and doesn’t take up too much of my brain’s CPU power. Also FreshBooks has the best customer service I’ve ever seen. They gave their blog readers a chance to get a copy of Entrepreneur magazine when they were the cover story. Inside was a Post It note as a thank you handwritten by the CEO of the company. That simple gesture still amazes me to this day.

Those are the four I use every single day. Notoriously absent from this list is Basecamp because I’ve never had a need for it before, despite following what 37signals does for the past five years. Recently, I’ve been using it for bigger projects with more group work. I expect to start using it on personal and client projects soon.

Writing — 2 comments — Short URL
13
Jan 10

Little Things

I often wonder how I can make the world a better place. Solve world hunger, educate underprivileged kids to give them a fighting chance, achieve world peace. While these are lofty goals, I’ve given in to the fact that I alone will never fully solve those problems. That doesn’t mean you and I can’t still make the world a better place by doing the little things.

Try these:

  1. Hold the door for someone, even if they are 15 seconds from getting to the door. The awkward eye contact and shy smiles will put you both in a good mood.
  2. Let someone go ahead of you in traffic. People merging onto a crowded highway tend to think they have the right of way. They don’t, but why not be nice and let them go. Traffic is stressful enough.
  3. Thank people. Always, thank people. I find it rude if you hold the door or elevator for someone and they do not thank me. The phrase is two words, but it weighs more than the 8 letters that make it up.
  4. Buy your romantic partner flowers on the way home from work. Or chocolate. Or a DVD. Or a book they’ve been eyeing.
  5. Compliment someone. Guys: You’d be surprised how far a small compliment goes to improve the mood of the women around you. Try “I like how you did your hair today” or “Your eyes look very blue today.”
  6. Start a conversation while waiting in line (queue as they say in Europe).
  7. Pick up a piece of trash rolling along the sidewalk.
  8. Let the mother behind you with three fidgety kids go ahead of you in the grocery line. You can wait another 5 minutes and her being 5 minutes closer to wrangling her kids into the car would mean the world.
  9. Randomly buy your friends something little. My friend bought me a CD a couple years ago and gave it to me straight from the Amazon package while we were checking our mail together. The CD was awesome and the gesture makes me crack a smile to this day.

Imagine the power to improve the world if everyone did one of these each day.

What would you add to this list?

Update: Unit Interactive released a site where people post something that made their day. I’m surprised how many of those things are little things that would take less than five minutes to do. Five minutes for 24 hours of happiness. Sounds like good ROI to me.

Design — 1 comment — Short URL
06
Jan 10

Letterpress

Over the past few weeks, I made my first Tumblr theme. It was an experiment in two ways:

  1. It was the first time I used HTML5 in production.
  2. It was also the first time I used the Tumblr theme language.

I’m used to WordPress and learning how Tumblr does it provided a good segway into learning ExpressionEngine, my next challenge.

HTML5

HTML5 has been an absolute pleasure to use. It’s the first HTML spec that has made complete sense to me. The addition of a few new tags (<header>, <nav>, <time>, etc) make my markup more semantic and useful to both humans and search engine robots. Not to mention the new doctype – <!doctype html> – is as simple as it will ever get.

Using HTML5 has been so great that I will be developing in that language from now on, mostly thanks to Modernizr for backwards compatibility.

Letterpress

Letterpress is the Tumblr theme I designed and coded. It was inspired by a whole array of letterpress prints, but most of all Dan Cederholm’s business card. Over 500 people are using it so far and it is growing steadily at about 30 more a day. That is a modestly popular theme by Tumblr’s standards, but I’m happy with it as my debut effort.

Let me know what you think of it. See it action on my Tumblr blog.

Design — 13 comments — Short URL
18
Dec 09

Cross Browser Checklist

Cross browser testing can be a pain for a web designer, so I tried to make it slightly more enjoyable with a simple checklist. These are all the things I personally check when coding and designing a site.

Download the cross browser checklist [PDF]

Is there anything you would add to it?

Updated 5/11/10: Unceremoniously removed IE6 testing and replaced it with a way cooler option (the iPad).

Design / Shorties — No comments — Short URL
12
Dec 09

Spaced Presentation

Inspired by an article by Jack Cheng, I decided to try something a little different during my semester at university. I typed up my notes for every class the evening after the class was over. That way, I would be exposed to the material once in the lecture, forget about it gradually throughout the day, and be reminded of it a couple hours later. This technique is called spaced presentation. By spreading out my learning, my brain retains more information for a longer period of time.

So how has it worked for me? It’s finals time and I’m not stressed out at all, which can seem impossible when you’re up against 5 or 6 tests that are collectively worth 30% of your entire grade. The pressure can be all-consuming, especially when Red Bull is pumping through your veins and you’re stuck at the library at 1am. What I’ve done by typing up my notes is invest in studying ahead of time rather than cramming the night before my test. It helps me perform better in the class and remember more useful info from the class.

Don’t believe me? Try to remember what you crammed for your first semester at college. I definitely don’t remember anything because my brain was on overload. I remembered it for the test and immediately pushed it out.

Work on your passion every day

Spaced presentation is also something I’m experimenting with for making myself a better designer. Every day, I’m reading two of the 100 design principles from a book called Universal Design Principles. It only takes about 15 minutes so I can easily fit it into my schedule.

I even set myself a reminder in my todo list program so I don't forget.

I even set myself a reminder in my todo list program, Things, so I never forget.

I’m at principle #50 right now and I’m going to stop after I’ve gone through the book two or three times. I don’t want to read these principles and forget it. These are something I want to subconsciously think about when designing so I’m working on making that happen a little bit every day so my brain doesn’t get overloaded.

What can you do?

What is one thing you’d like to know more about? It could be anything; design, writing, jewelry making, wood carving or your required bio stats class. Try working on it for 20 minutes every single day (or maybe 45 minutes three times a week). Read an article or do a few practice problems. You’re not only going over the material repetitively, but you’re doing it in such a way that your brain can handle all of the information without overflowing with knowledge.

Writing — 1 comment — Short URL
18
Nov 09

Give Me Some Space

From now on, you’re not allowed to put two spaces after a sentence. Only use one. I know two is what you were taught, but it puts too much space in between thoughts.

One space helps your writing flow better because the reader doesn’t get distracted by the unnecessary white space.

Design — No comments — Short URL
14
Nov 09

Zone Out Button

I listen to podcasts (Boagworld and Rails Envy to name a few) on my way to school every day. I listen to them when I’m trying to zone out of the mind-numbing traffic. The interesting content makes me think more about web development and less about the 94 Honda that just cut me off (does he really think he’s going to get there any faster?!)

Sometimes my brain wanders off. I hear an interesting statement and think about that for a minute or so. I learn a lot thinking through problems on my own, but the podcast doesn’t stop when my brain stops listening.

Zone Out Button

I was delighted to find this little interface tidbit on Apple’s iPod Touch:

zone-out-button

Tapping this button will rewind the podcast 30 seconds, the usual amount of time for one of my “zone out” sessions. This is a common activity and this button is proving useful time and time again.

Here's the affectionately named zone out button in context of the play controls.

Here's the affectionately named zone out button in context of the play controls.

This button made me think about what common action in my interfaces can be contained in one button. One button, one click, one tap of the finger is such a simple activity and will be infinitely usable if the user constantly does this task or set of actions.

You shouldn’t feel the need to quarantine every possible action into a single button, but think of a few task your users perform constantly and ask how you can automate that process.

Capistrano

Another example of this “single button” concept is Capistrano. It is a command line tool (meaning no visual interface at all) that allows you deploy a new version of your site to a web server by entering one command:

$ cap deploy

Without this easy-to-memorize command, I would have to manually copy the latest revision to my site from my source control repository, upload it to my server and run tests to make sure I didn’t break anything. Capistrano does all that for me. Automatically. With one command.

Capistrano and the zone out button allow me to worry less about stuff I do all the time and concentrate on the thing that actually produces value: learning from the podcast and making my sites better.

Ask yourself

  • What can I do to make a few really common tasks easier on all of my users?
  • How can I take some of the monotonous burden of my interface off of their shoulders and outsource a common set of actions to a single button?
Writing — No comments — Short URL
05
Nov 09

Avoid Generalizations

i-heart-generalizations

Generalizations (as in “Most user don’t know what a double click is.”) are worse than not writing anything at all. They mean nothing and waste the reader’s time. On the internet, having a reader spend time on your site is a privilege. Write wisely.

Common Offenders

  • Research shows that – “Research shows that IE6 is one of the most popular browsers ever.” – If research does actually support your argument, cite it. Otherwise, don’t make it up.
  • Most – “Most users don’t scroll below the fold.” – ‘Most’ is unspecific. It could mean 51% or 99.99%. Use a more specific number instead, even if it’s an informal survey of your friends or your past experiences (I find that 55% of my readers don’t scroll below the fold.)
  • More – “More often than not a user doesn’t even go to a second page.” – If it’s true, prove it. Cite the source or your experience. Make it a more specific statement.
  • A lot – “A lot of wars have happened in the past.” – The phrase ‘a lot’ is relative. Does it mean 5? 150? 700 billion?
  • Some say – The only one who can pull this off is Jeremy Clarkson when he introduces the Stig. (Some say that he’s seen the Lion King 1,780 times)
  • They say – “They say that the swine flu will be bad this year.” – Who said that? The experts did. What experts? Errrr…

It’s okay to use these words and phrases, but don’t base your writing on them. Don’t overuse generalizations. Used occasionally, they can reinforce your point. If they are your point, you might not have much substance behind your writing to begin with. Work on the substance instead of your generalizations and your writing will be more useful and comprehensive.

Design — 1 comment — Short URL
02
Nov 09

Smashing Magazine Redesign

Smashing Magazine recently redesigned their entire site. They produce great content, but this redesign results in a horrible user experience.

For a site that has many articles about usability and user experience, their site isn’t usable at all. People go to their site to read interesting and unique content, but their recent design work takes a step in the exact opposite direction.

Overwhelming Advertisements

smashing-homepage

Their homepage looks pretty but focuses very little on their unique content. No focus on content for a blog = bad user experience. I’m here to look at your articles, not your ads. I understand having ads there to generate revenue for your hard work. I’m not disappointed in the ads existence but rather I’m disappointed by the sheer number of ads.

smashing-article

Their individual article pages are even worse! Fullscreen on my MacBook and this is how much content is displayed. Let me highlight the parts an average reader of Smashing Magazine would be interested in.

smashing-article-highlighted

My rough calculations put the useful content as 89,000 pixels out of a total of 823,880 pixels. That is 11% of my entire screen! It is unacceptable to waste 89% of your reader’s screen on unnecessary elements. Waste 20% at the most with advertisements and anything not absolutely critical to the usability of your site.

You might be able to count the navigation and search as useful parts. That would bring the total up to 193,000 useful pixels. Still a paltry 23% of the screen is useful on an article page.

Buggy Browsers

Not supporting IE6 is okay in my book, but you shouldn’t make their experience completely unusable. Instead of worrying about support for the dying browser, serve up an unstyled version of the site instead. The people on IE6 visiting Smashing Magazine, a blog devoted to pushing the boundaries of the internet, probably have no choice to upgrade. They are the ones browsing Smashing Mag during their lunch break at XYZ Corporation dreaming of greener pastures.

Safari Bug Hunting

buggy-browser

If you’re going to push the boundaries what is capable on websites, make sure your own website displays correctly in modern browsers. Above is a screenshot of my main browser, Safari 4.0.3. There is an error in the CSS that makes it almost impossible to click on the “read more” links.

Not All Bad

good-navigation

The new navigation is great. It’s clear, simple and padded. The category dropdown is easy to use and saves a lot of screen space. This is the best improvement to the new Smashing Magazine.

smashing-footer-illustration

This illustration on the footer gives me a sneak peek at what the guys and girls behind Smashing Mag look like. This helps to make it more personable, memorable and fun.

Overall

The redesign of Smashing Mag is 2 steps forward and 8 steps backward. Their following (170,000+ people!) would benefit more from an increased amount of content on the page (with necessary whitespace) and not an increase in the ad space, especially on the article page.

Will I stop reading their articles and writing for them? Absolutely not. Their authors put out some great content and it’s a shame that the unique content wasn’t the focus of the new design. I’ll be comfortably reading Smashing Mag from my RSS reader from now on.

Design — No comments — Short URL
27
Oct 09

Instapaper on Kindle

Update: The problem isn’t on Instapaper’s end. Marco already has a similar solution to what I suggested.

“Amazon doesn’t reliably deliver my messages to customers’ Kindles. For some people, it works great. For others, I trigger some filter after a while and Amazon randomly blocks Instapaper emails from hitting their accounts unless they call Amazon’s customer service and have them remove the block.”

That’s a shame because Instapaper would be that much more useful with consistent support from Amazon’s PDF conversion service.


I am constantly reading books, but they are mostly technical ones that I like to highlight and markup the margins. Amazon’s Kindle wouldn’t do me much good there. I read tons of blog articles, usually 20 at a time. This is where the combination of Instapaper and Kindle can become a game changer.

There is one thing that will immediately get me to shell out $259 for the Kindle: Instapaper automatically syncing with the Kindle. Instapaper has become a part of my daily routine. I check my feeds throughout the day, open any articles I want to read and save them to my Instapaper account. After I’m done work for the day, I sit on my couch and read the articles from Instapaper on my MacBook. Reading on a backlit screen isn’t ideal because it strains my eyes (and I’m a pretty young lad). I’ve tried reading on my iPhone too, but that didn’t help much either.

Possible User Experience for InstaKindle1

Not much would change about the way I save my articles. What would change is how I read them. Every night, my unread articles on Instapaper would be quietly converted to a single PDF document and emailed to my special Kindle address.2 It would arrive at my virtual doorstep at 6am and be ready for consumption during my morning tea. It would imitate the experience of a morning newspaper at a much lower cost. It would be targeted to exactly the articles I want to read because I’m the one that picked them. It would be comparably easy to read because of the Kindle’s E Ink.

Having Instapaper and the Kindle collaborate to bring me my ultra-targeted newspaper subscription in the morning would be the ideal experience for me.

  1. I just made that name up. Feel free to use it, although Amazon might not like that. [↩]
  2. Marco Arment already has a great start to this functionality. [↩]
Design — 1 comment — Short URL
26
Oct 09

Be Inspired, Don’t Copy

Coming up with new design ideas is tough work, that’s why designers get paid the big bucks. If you want to be a reputable designer, the absolute last thing you should do is copy someone else’s work. Copying has no benefits.

  • You don’t learn the thought process behind the design.
  • You don’t learn the reasons why a designer made the button a certain way.
  • You don’t know why she put the logo on the left side or why she emphasizes a certain header over another one.
  • Copying is a way for lazy designers to cop out.

All you see in a finished design is that it looks cool. You want that appeal on your page but don’t want to put in the work behind it.

Be Inspired Instead

Seek out posts about why designs ended up as they did. 37signal’s Design Explorations are a valuable learning tool. As is Next Update by Garrett Dimon. Tim Van Damme has inspired quite a few people to make a personal “business card” website like his own.1 He even inspired me. Unfortunately, many people felt that it was okay to copy directly off his design. Tim worked hard to make his design useful and beautiful, but the lazy designers spent no time and effort and just copy and pasted his source code.

Do you want to be a lazy designer or a designer who learns from and is inspired by others?

Latest Offender

I came across one of these lazy designers when Tim tweeted about this fellow’s latest “design.” He thought it was okay to rip off the design of the Ballpark marketing page. See if you can spot the similarities:

bad-designergood_designer

The designer even has the stones to photoshop in his web address into the screenshot and change it to his product name in all of the testimonials.

Copying directly from one of your competitors is not a good way to get your business started on the right foot.

What’s Okay To Do

Be inspired. Seeing a particular element you like and modifying it to fit your site is okay. For example, say you like how atebits has an inset look to its dividers. Look at the code that makes that happen and learn from it. Take what you learned over to your site and change it to fit your design. It might look better with a larger shadow, a darker color, or maybe if you completely change it to green.

Side note: Don’t forget it’s possible to be inspired by something outside your normal line of work. Try going to the park, walking through a crowded street, or exploring what’s popular on Tumblr and Flickr. Something might catch your eye.

  1. See his Hall of Fame [↩]
Design — No comments — Short URL
25
Oct 09

Bloomframe

Bloomframe window/balcony

The Bloomframe is a window that turns into a balcony on demand with motorized controls. All you have to do to convert your window into a glass-paneled balcony is hit a button on a remote.

This is an incredible engineering feat and I can’t wait to see this in a real life application. The company started production as of September 2009.

It would be great for people in downtown penthouses because it would allow you to get outside while savings a lot of space and hassle. If it starts to rain, just close it up and enjoy the storm.

Business — No comments — Short URL
24
Oct 09

Why Angels Should Charge Startups To Pitch Their Ideas

Jason Calacanis revealed a “scam” in the startup investment market: some angel investors are charging would-be entrepreneurs to pitch them. How dare they? He disagrees with this practice, but I tend to think what those angels are doing is a good idea.

Why Angels Should Charge Potential Entrepreneurs

  1. Eliminates spam. Not typical email spam, but it is a way to separate out the great ideas from the startups that are using the shotgun approach. If an entrepreneur isn’t willing to fork over $10K to pitch their revolutionary business idea, I would start to doubt how truly revolutionary their idea is.
  2. Allows angels to concentrate on the really great ideas. With all the noise deterred by the entrance fee, the entrepreneurs that are left are going to be the cream of the crop. If an angel firm used to see 100 pitches a month, but now they see 20 and still invest in the same number of startups, wouldn’t that be a good thing?
  3. Idiots get shut down immediately. “Entrepreneurs” who are out to make a quick buck while putting someone else’s money wouldn’t even consider paying to pitch. This represents a small number of startups. The one’s with great ideas are going to succeed regardless of whether they pay to pitch or not, but the idiots are going to have a harder time if their money is on the line.

Luckily, if you disagree with this practice, the solution is easy: don’t pitch the angels that charge you money.

The angels who are charging are not doing this to make more money. $10K is nothing when your net worth is in the double digit millions.1 They are doing this to eliminate the entrepreneurs who don’t truly believe in this product in a subtle subconscious way.

Angels who charge for a pitch are going to have higher quality ideas being presented to them and likely have a higher success rate.

Keep in mind that these startups are asking for million of dollars of an angel’s money for a business that might not work. If you’re successful in raising $10,000,000, what is a $10K investment up front?2 To me, that seems worth it.

What if Craigslist charged $1 for a listing by Seth Godin illustrates this point perfectly although using a different example.

  1. If you have $15,000,000 in the bank, you earn $3,300 in interest every single day at a modest 8% interest. [↩]
  2. Literally speaking, $10K is 0.1% of 10 million. [↩]
Shorties — 1 comment — Short URL
24
Oct 09

What If Your Clients Acted Like This All the Time…

Guy: I mean, lunch at the taco stand was what?

Girl: About $12.

Guy: Yeah about $12.

Waiter: Sir, we’re not the taco stand.

Guy: I had beef – same thing.

Waiter: You had the Filet…

Guy: Yeah… cow.

Why do clients try to nickel and dime your design work, but they don’t haggle with people at the grocery store? The work we’re doing is much more valuable to them anyway.

Design — 3 comments — Short URL
23
Oct 09

Do Blogs Need Your Email When You Comment?

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer: The point of having an email field in a comment form is to have a way for the site owner to contact the commenter. I do not believe that field is necessary and adds unnecessary complexity to your form. Complexity discourages people from commenting and in turn weakens your blog community.

Real life example: Imagine you are giving a keynote. After your talk, you strike up conversations with audience members. They compliment you, ask you questions, and suggest alternatives to what you said. All of these are real world comments, but you’re not asking for any email address. At the most, you’ll ask their name to keep in touch.

That same practice should carry over to the blog world. People’s names and comments are most important to the discussion. If the person wants to be contacted, they can leave a link to one of their sites.

Spencer Fry eliminating one field form his comment form encourages readers to leave a comment.

Spencer Fry eliminating one field form his comment form encourages readers to leave a comment.

Always keep your fields down to the bare minimum. Only include basic fundamental fields to ease the burden on your users.

Update: What’s worse than asking for your email when you want to comment?

johnnyholland.org

Answer: Having an email field and a CAPTCHA. This is from a user experience blog nonetheless, the last place I'd expect to see one.