Archive for the ‘rants’ Category

Accessibility is an important and worthy goal, but it is not at odds with good design. We should settle for nothing less than beautiful and accessible currency. This isn’t it. 

— John Gruber, April 3, 2008

Recently the U.S. Mint released new five dollar bills that have been redesigned in the same style as all the other denominations. Larger numerals have been added to the obverse sides of each bill, presumably to aid in identification by the sight impaired. The bills also contain further deterrents for would-be counterfeiters, like UV inks and special watermarks. But the money still looks the same. It looks like a multi-car pileup on the freeway of design by committee. And the worst part is most of the committee members never even lived in the same century. It seems as though American currency design has gone the way of most design here: an act of contrition to the flow of time, an act of desperation against petty (and not so petty) crime, and a half-hearted nod to those less fortunate than ourselves.

The goal of “beautiful currency” is probably meaningless to most people. Money is a means, a way to buy lunch and put gas in the tank. But more than any official document or printed decree, money is an ambassador. When the U.S. dollar was strong, millions of these little treaties on American ideals were in circulation in parts of the world where few knew anything about us, testifying for us—even if we could never measure up to all those hopelessly noble faces and mighty monuments of architectural achievement.

The five dollar bill I fidgeted with tonight in line at the grocery store looked like a ransom note from some amateurish kidnapper, stained with red Kool-Aid and ham-fisted attempts at foiling teenagers at Kinko’s late at night. The enormous Helvetica “5″ on its back seemed placed there if not totally by accident then at least without care. Held up to the light I saw the lovingly engraved portrait of Lincoln, the president who managed to give his life convincing half a nation that maybe owning humans like cattle was a terribly bad idea, bemusedly looking on at that purple numeral in reverse.

American money, in addition to being stinky, is ugly. And it’s getting worse. But look on the bright side: at least now its looks and its value are getting in synch. The worse our money gets in terms of its aesthetic value, the more it slips in international market value. Am I suggesting that somehow all the world is as shallow as we are? That somehow, entire Saudi families loved the look of the 1967 fifty-dollar bill so much that they stock-piled them in their palaces by the millions and swam around in them like Scrooge McDuck based solely on looks? In a word, no. But design, as Steve Jobs likes to say, is not how it looks; it’s how it works.

So ask yourself next time you’re at the pump putting eight of these new bills in your gas tank if design makes any difference to you. Would it make any difference if the money you used to do it were beautiful, with slogans that reminded you of a bygone part of our shared history that through perseverance and sound governance we could return to? Or would you rather have the key to a Holiday Inn, with a sticker on the back marked by hand in ball-point pen: do not copy?

I’ve been doing some work recently, trying to re-invent the index page of a really large project that I’ve been attached to for almost a year now. It’s a homepage for a community portal site that is produced by an “old media” company, a newspaper specifically. As I’ve submitted countless designs for every imaginable user interface element and page layout, I was reluctant to start again; our company in internally famous for epic and glacial “feedback loops”, and I was in no hurry to find myself defending every last inch of my work to people who may or may not have any idea why it’s important—given their somewhat ironic position of web people trapped inside a newspaper.

After a recent submission, I received a well worded and polite response. It essentially said that we were very close to having a finished candidate, but some tweaks to color would be necessary to move on. I’m fine with this, at least publicly. Internally, however, it makes me want to scream. Even though the writer is a seasoned veteran of the newspaper industry with an above average grasp of the internet as a communications medium, it still makes me cringe. As a company we’ve been tasked with growing virtually every metric we have to measure ourselves by an abstract percentage. That number is in turn based on something only a newspaper would have the sense of humor to map its success against: the penetration and market size of the average locally owned TV station—the other dying medium, besides making records to sell. Management hasn’t been given any terribly clear direction about how this might be accomplished, but many of them seem to think more display ads will do the trick. This is what I hear approximately half the time: grow business, design with ad space in mind, make it conservative. The other half of the time I hear make it ‘web 2.0’, we need ajax, we want comments and tags on everything.

Someone is lying, or wrong, or both.

So when I get feedback on a design whose brief was “bleeding edge, ajax, show-and-hide” that says “these colors are too bright” I feel as though I’ve landed on the ape planet, and there’s a giant Photoshop toolbar jutting out of the surf at right angles. But I’ve realized now that it’s just because we’re trying to do two things at once. We somehow need to keep the average 54 year old female reader—who revolts and calls us on the phone when we move the sudoku puzzle—and convince the 18 year old that we are just as cool as Digg. I’m growing increasingly dubious as to whether this can be done.

I think these dual goals are fairly common in businesses like newspapers, where it’s increasingly obvious that current technology has rendered the stuff we were once good at pointless; there’s a feeling of wanting to hold on firmly to the vine in hand while you look for the next one, even though everyone is telling you it won’t hold you and your baggage. Another example is the frenzy to extend support for IE 6. The fear of making customers unhappy by not supporting their nine year old software—or losing them altogether without more to replace them—is palpable. This fear pushes companies into announcing, with all seriousness, an intention to post positive growth simultaneously along every measurement it has for itself. It makes them spend time and effort figuring out custom newspapers that only cover your specific eighteen block neighborhood. It makes them hate Craig Newmark. It makes them announce they are competing with Google.

When we set out to redesign this site almost a year ago our team did everything it possibly could to distance ourselves from newspapers. We chose a software back-end that, up until that time, had been largely untested for that specific purpose; we designed with wild, complimentary colors and urbane type faces; we envisioned a site where almost everything was user-centric, where you never saw anything that you didn’t ask for. In the process that ensued, whittling away became incising. What is left bears enough resemblance to be recognizable to us, but I’m not sure it’s what we promised our users. We’re a different group now, and even though current events keep some of us trapped in meetings for hours at a time there are still good ideas circulating here. Newspapers want you to believe that being successful in 2008 would require them to see into the future. This is a lie. It would merely require them to see into last week. The pieces are all here, and there are thousands of people who want to do the work. It’s just that for every one of them there’s a counterpart, working hard to make sure we keep serving two masters.

I don’t know, maybe he just hates green. (And he really is a nice guy. Shame about the green, though.)

The truth is that I’d like to quit my job and start a rock band.

The truth is that I hate my commute, except for the part when I cross the bridge and the part when I pull into the drive way. The truth is that I stay pretty tired, but it’s okay cause our bed is pretty comfortable. The truth is that I desperately need to get into the gym, and write more posts, and take more photos with a real camera and fewer with a phone. The truth is that Juno was much better than National Treasure Part 2, or whatever is was officially called.

The truth is they might sell the company I work for, and I’m not having much luck caring or even understanding what that might mean—the truth must be that consolidation is Good™.

The truth is I bought a two pound bag of jerky, and have convinced even my wife that it’s awesome stuff. The truth is my XBox finally caught the red ring of death, and we might get a Wii assuming I can find one. The truth is it feels good to tell the truth, even a small one.

Although some of you (one of you) is probably waiting on part 2 of the iPhone review, I thought I might relate something else that’s been going on around here. Frankly, I’m experiencing iPhone overload and, well, this is sort of interesting.

My wife and I may be moving into a new house. We’re approaching the whole thing with more than a little bit of caution, and trying to weigh all the possible angles with definite consideration; who wants to get stuck in a terrible house that looked nice from the curb but is obviously haunted by pirate ghosts? In any case part of this process is looking at our current monthly expenses, trimming what we can and dropping what we don’t need. It also means doing the “pre-qualification dance”. This means calling various private and/or government institutions and asking for things, which never works out very well for me. I spend a few hours every month fighting with Sprint or Time Warner, and my wife spends about the same amount of time just with out current rental agency on random mammal invaders. These calls are normally stressful, long and unproductive. But this week I’ve discovered an untapped vein of karma and good will.

A few days ago I need a three year old W2 form. I called the IRS for a reprint and after a brief hold I spoke with a very pleasant IRS employee (oxy moron, if there ever was one) who not only was glad to fax me a copy, but would call me back when I was near my office fax machine and send it to me. She called me back at the very minute she’d promised to, and even explained the transcript to me. Then, last night I had to call Netflix to admit to them that a DVD had gone missing, swallowed up by the monster that is a wedding and a honeymoon. The rep congratulated me on my wedding, cheerfully forgave me the loss of the DVD and even told me how to easily combine my account and Shannon’s while saving me eight dollars. I was on a roll, so I called Time Warner Cable to argue my bill, like every month.

The vein of karma sputtered and coughed, as I was treated to possibly the rudest phone rep in the history of customer service. Finally, in shock, I simply hung up the phone and got myself a beer. Had the well finally run dry? Were the bad old days here again? I called Time Warner again, hoping for someone other then Eva Braun.

Unbelievably the next rep I spoke to was not only polite, but was apologetic on the previous one’s behalf. She expressed what seemed like genuine sympathy (even irritation) for Time Warner’s tendency to double- and over-bill us, fixed it and took my payment without a service charge. Before I hung up I told her, “You’ve just demonstrated one of the major principles of customer service: I would have given this money to any rep, but giving it to the nice rep made it hurt less.” And it kept my karma flow intact. So, what else should I do with all this good will the universe is pointing at me? Maybe this is the week to try fugu.

At a conference yesterday, during a discussion of some future projects being planned by my company, we were presented with some MS Word wireframes for a new search product. These wireframes had been created by a rather highly placed product developer–essentially a psuedo-engineer–and yet they contained graphical representations of theoretical ad units within the page diagrams. This got me thinking.

Initially I began to worry about the integrity of an engineer–any engineer–who would willingly deface his work with marketing apparatus. I then began to postulate on the worth and value of ad units in the big picture of for-profit internet ventures. Lying awake that night I began to trace the history of advertising as it pertained to me, and my earliest exposures to various forms of marketing. It led me to openly question the need for advertising anywhere within the confines of an index page.

Let me explain.

I work for a “media” company, which is a fancy way of saying I work for a slowly dying newspaper desperately attempting to diversify itself out of irrelevance. This is, by definition, not a dot com or a “web 2.0″ outfit. We are solidly rooted in the business of replacing the craigslistified revenue stream of classified advertising with something else, to varying degrees of success. One thing we’ve trained ourselves to believe, some of us anyway, is that banner advertising works; and by works I mean clients buy ads, we post them, people click on them and make purchases based on their existence. Rinse and repeat.

In this model two actual transactions take place, one which results in profit for the advertiser and one for the publication on which the ad appears, respectively. This agreed definition is what drives internet advertising sales within media companies. The notion that visibility counts for something is very powerful to companies like newspapers who have for a hundred years relied on little more than reputation to sell ink. The problem is, after ten years of using and developing the web, I’ve observed the process to be broken.

Advertisers and media companies go back and forth about whether web advertising works, inventing new ad positions and platforms every 14 months or so as needed to prop up flagging response, while users struggle along just trying to avoid all this background noise. When I explain this people usually accuse me of being an overly sensitive designer, unwilling to have his precious design destroyed by some blinking travesty of a Flash ad. While this may be true, I ask you to explain to me why there are no banner ads on television? Why are there no interstitial ads as I surf from channel to channel? If I open an issue of Time magazine and begin to read an article about male impotence, why is there no Viagra ad underneath the second paragraph?

Furthermore, if it works so well, why do we all hide it in a giant bar along the right or left hand sides of our page layouts, removed from the flow in an obvious attempt to reduce the visual clutter? We’ve managed to build our sales competency to levels that would make Willy Loman quake in his Thom McCans, but we can’t figure out any more sophisticated ways of doing ads than to chuck some blinking shit into a square? Dude.

But we have to make money, I hear you say. Of course you do.

Head over to youtube.com. Go ahead, I’ll wait. What’s that on the right hand side of the screen? It’s a sophisticated cross branded ad for the UFC on Spike TV, in my case. Not a banner. Not a dancing bear with crosshairs. A piece of content made to look exactly like all the other content on youtube–a video, with player controls and ratings. Brilliant. I bet Spike TV spent a chunk of change they normally reserve only for national airtime on a spot like that. I bet it works like hell, too. Or what about Daring Fireball? John Gruber is a full time blogger monetizing his site through The Deck, a targeted advertising network. It vets all its advertisers before letting them join–it even invites some of them, imagine that–and makes sure that the advertisers message will match the spot in which it will appear. Talk about targeted.

And there’s Text Link Ads, and Google AdWords, both products that maintain the visual flow and scannability of a text heavy page–or get out of the way of complex web apps with lots of granular steps–while still providing solutions for monetization.

In my experience the internet is really quite simple; it’s a users medium, slanted hopelessly against media companies and “old media” outlets looking to make a quick buck. It resists attempts to be balkanized, because that’s what the military–and Sir Berners-Lee–designed it to do. We talk so much about building trust, building the brand, being friends with our users–and then we build peel over ads. We use ad positions with sound and no readily available mute button. Then we build in a mute button and count everyone who uses it in our clickthru numbers, and pass that shit on to advertisers. If the internet is the Wild West we are a bunch of crooked sheriffs, telling the townsfolk we’ll protect them with our content, then taking a bribe from Billy The Kid with our ad units.

We have to let go. To get out of the way. We must honor the user. We cannot make a business model out of insinuating ourselves into processes where we don’t belong. Satellite radio, the Tivo and scissors all exist to remove advertising from the experience. I want the internet to be the first medium that says, “We hear you, yes begging for money is irritating and necessary, and we have some solutions to make us all happy.” So far, for old media in search of new money, all we’re saying is “pardon the interruption”–and by “pardon” we mean “screw you” and by “the interruption” we mean “click here, sucker.”

So, I’m in the bathroom this afternoon and I hear someone come in and step up to do his business.

He’s talking on the phone.

While that alone would be pretty deplorable–having a conversation on the phone while using the freakin’ toilet–the content of his conversation proved to be much worse. This past weekend two teenage girls were killed by a drunk driver. They were good students wearing their seatbelts, with families and hobbies. A candlelight vigil is being held in their honor at a local landmark tonight.

The pee phone guy is a content producer here. He was advising a camera crew about going out to get footage.

“Yeah,” he said. “The best friend’ll be there, the family. It’s one-stop shopping for misery.”

Wow. Is this thing still here? Hm. Okay. I’ll tell you a story.

I’ve just finished my first product launch for hamptonroads and pilotonline. I’ve learned a lot of new things, had some realizations and am in a new office. But I was also reintroduced to several old nemeses, not the least of which is IE6 for Windows. Both members of our little rogue design group tried very had to write semantic and meaningful markup; we tried to keep a wide range of users in mind and leave out the least amount of folks; we pushed hard for user testing and made the best use we could (in the few scant weeks we had) with what we learned. But as the UI person I struggled hard to justify IE6 support. At almost every turn IE would chew up my day in twenty and thirty minute chunks. Almost every UI feature, no matter how simplistic, was met with a dirty diaper on IE’s part.

There are so many blogs dedicated to IE6 and its rendering issues that I could scarecly list them all here. The more I think I understand about quirks mode and about graceful degradation of my code, the more I am shown up by the fantastic ways in which IE fails. The true kicker is that IE7 is only better (than Firefox, natch) in about 70% of cases. It deals with many outstanding irritations but leaves enough untouched or unchanged to make me really angry.

See, there’s a specification for all this browser writing. It’s not as if Microsoft was asked to make it up as it went along, or reverse engineer something secret or copyrighted: this is a fucking agreed upon standard. Large groups of people took time out of their busy lives to write all this shit down and get various heavyweights to sign their names to it. Most ironic is the fact that Microsoft itself had a hand in the original web consortium. The question is what could they gain from ignoring an open standard as important as this one?

Microsoft’s defiance of standards bears obvious fruit in many cases. Creating a “secondary standard” they alone can support means primary and tertiary streams of income that, while evil, makes business sense. But attracting the derision of anyone with even a novice’s knowlegde of web development has no business purpose that I’ve been able to see. It’s only purpose seems to be making me turn purple at work while thinking of ways in which I could gleefully end the lives of various Microsoft employees.

So, in my own work I’m dropping it. Here’s why.

If I were working in television, and you told me I had to shoot everything in black and white because getting a color TV — even though it was free, and people were even offering to put it in the car for you — was not an option, I’d laugh at you. In the days of broadband you always have a choice, especially when IE6 only runs on systems whose specifications practically assume they’ll be owned by people who can afford (and would prefer) broadband. The Firefox installer is around 18 megabytes and takes three minutes to run, even less on a Mac. Safari is a great option too. Hell, anything that attempts to fully support a set of seven year old specifications is an option.

Soon IE7 will be install in enough places so that I can stop doing the “!important” hack, and I can specify separate print stylesheets without having to have clean nappies on hand for IE. Until then, if you can’t find me, just listen for the guy yelling about IE rendering bugs. It’s probably me. ~