Danny DeBelius

This post from Mike Monteiro should be required reading for designers and supervisors of designers alike.

First rule of design feedback: what you’re looking at is not art. It’s not even close. It’s a business tool in the making and should be looked at objectively like any other business tool you work with. The right question is not, “Do I like it?” but “Does this meet our goals?” If it’s blue, don’t ask yourself whether you like blue. Ask yourself if blue is going to help you sell sprockets. Better yet: ask your design team. You just wrote your first feedback question.

And this point on the pitfalls of design compromise is especially poignant:

“John in marketing wants to be able to log in directly on the home page, but Tim in Engineering would prefer it on its own page. Can we compromise?”

No. We cannot compromise.

If you tell your barber that you like it short, but your significant other likes it long, you’re gonna get a mullet.

Can we agree to stop compromising our way into design mullets?

Google Fellow Amit Singhal, head of the search ranking and algorithm team, spoke with Fast Company about how his team worked through the user experience challenges of the search product’s auto-complete feature:

“One of the problems we faced early on in this design process was whether to have the entire query be one color or give a grayish version of the completion,” he explains. “This was a design problem. How about we use probability to pick the grayness of the text? If the probability is 100%, then you might as well make it black. If the probability is low, you want to make it more faded.”

This approach is very scientific (not to mention oddly familiar to 41 Blues), and Google wouldn’t have it any other way. To Singhal, the process must begin with a hypothesis: “Should the probability of completion govern the density of gray?” This hypothesis was tested internally and externally, which helped the team decide whether or not they were “hurting the user experience.”

I am always fascinated by Google’s dogmatic approach to these questions. While I would never argue that Google’s scientific approach is without merit, deferring to the raw data of A/B testing almost guarantees that these interfaces will rarely demonstrate any vision beyond the established interaction patterns of the day.

One great example where this scientific approach would have failed is Apple’s decision to forgo a hardware keyboard on the iPhone in favor of a software-based solution. We all remember the wide apprehension regarding the software keyboard when Apple launched the first iPhone. Users would never accept it, critics argued.

Almost four years later, the iPhone has firmly established the software keyboard interface as the new standard for mobile devices, and the hardware keyboard is increasingly absent from new smartphone designs as iOS and Android devices have come to dominate that market.

/via Andrew DeVigal

The Times posted a great write-up of their election-night iPad optimizations:

The most exciting aspect of the iPad-optimized site is the interactive map. In the past, our election maps were delivered with Flash. Trying to recreate the finesse of the desktop Flash versions was quite a challenge on a resource-constrained computing device. Months ahead of Election Day, Times cartographer Matt Bloch researched and implemented a swath of JavaScript optimizations to improve load time as well as rendering speed. Some of these optimizations were quite novel, such as delivering the map geometry in a custom binary format. We also applied WebKit CSS transforms to improve the performance of zooming.

If you happened to check out nytimes.com on election night, you know that the results were truly stunning.

This gem from Seth Godin hits so close to home for me as a digital news designer that my jaw feels a little sore now:

Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn’t free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.

And it’s hard to go backward.

More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.

It’s going to be a long road for a lot of media organizations to retrain their users to pay attention again.

Aza Raskin:

2,500 years ago, a Greek writer told us something about creating software: Thucydides wrote, “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” The optimal society is one that mixes scholar-warriors and warrior-scholars. The same is true for companies that schism their designers and engineers. The most important trait a team can have is empathy. Without it, the implementers will not care, and the designers will not be realistic. When companies complain of specs and code being “tossed over the fence,” a lack of empathy is to blame.

Despite the allusion’s flair for the dramatic, Aza’s point rings true. My job is infinitely more enjoyable when the engineers I work with care about the interface. Likewise, I hope I exhibit an awareness of the challenges they face on the back-end.

/via Jeff Croft

Khoi Vinh today announced he has completed a new book on grid design for the web. Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design will ship in early December:

“Ordering Disorder” is an overview of all of my thoughts on using the typographic grid in the practice of Web design. The first part of the book covers the theories behind grid design, the historical underpinnings of the grid, how they’re relevant (and occasionally irrelevant) to the work of Web designers — and a bit of my personal experience coming to grips with grids as a tool.

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.

There’s just so much to appreciate in this post from Frank Chimero; I hardly know where to start.

On creative evolution:

It’s tough to appease an audience. They’re not made privy to the fact that a way of reasoning comes to an end. All they know is that the last thing you made is fantastic, and this new thing that you made is not the same as that last thing. But, worse yet, if you hang on and ride a dying horse too long, they notice and become impatient as your schtick becomes long in the tooth. My feeling is that it’s better to recognize when a way of approaching the work ends and to change on your own accord, even if it means giving a bit of whiplash to your audience and alienating a few of them.

On the devolution of art and attention span:

Art seems more relevant than ever, especially in an age of “content.” Content is so easy: it accommodates to your lifestyle, fits seamlessly into the negative space while waiting for the bus or while in the waiting room of the doctor or to fill the extra cognitive space as we mull away at the mundane task of satisfying the demands of our inboxes. Art is being transformed to content to squeeze itself into the cracks of our splintered attention.

I’m not placing a value judgement on this, but this makes Kid A feel like a bit of a relic. A last gasp for something that requires the whole of your mental space. I couldn’t drive and listen to the album when I bought it for the first few songs. I just couldn’t: the sound was demanding, and any headspace I had left while listening was mostly just repeating to myself “Is this real?”

Frank’s admonition to seek out challenging writing and music resonates deeply as I’ve recently become painfully aware of the devastating effect my content consumption habits have had on my attention span. I’ve resolved to do what I can to fight it, hence the Dostoevsky currently occupying the top slot in my Kindle app.

Khoi Vinh:

The default reaction of most print publishers since the advent of the Internet has almost always been “Let’s make it just like print.” It’s been tried again and again and it never works. So the fact that publishers are trying it yet again on the iPad doesn’t strike me as experimentation at all.

I think we can all agree that the vast majority of magazine iPad apps released thus far have exhibited an unfortunate preoccupation with replicating the zeitgeist of print’s glory days.

Khoi presents a cogent argument that segregating iPad content from the rest of the web is just the latest example of publishers failing to learn from their mistakes.

Be sure to read the initial post that led to this follow-up.