I’m just about finished with Merlin Mann & Dan Benjamin’s inaugural podcast, Back to Work, which is too long.
They get in a bit at the end about interface clutter in Photoshop and in UNIX manuals, which is a bit ironic as it’s really a question of editing: focusing attention to the most important commands in the interface (or the most interesting parts of the podcast).
There are lots of ways to accomplish this with design, but it’s one of the best places to approach a design problem.
What are the most important pieces of content? What will the user spend most of her time trying to do? Find that, and cut out or bury as much of the rest as possible. People who need more will find it. Most people just want the basics, quickly.
So there’s a logo for HTML5. Some prominent people don’t like it—especially Jeremy Keith.
In particular, they object to this HTML5 logo representing things that aren’t in the HTML5 specification: CSS3, SVG, WOFF, and so on. This represents an unacceptable muddying of the terminology from the W3C, the body that actually defines what is, and isn’t, HTML5.
No.
As I see it, there are three meanings of HTML5 floating about:
The whole suite of web technologies currently being embraced by modern browsers,
the subset of the above explicitly covered by the HTML5 specification (markup, web forms, and an array of new JavaScript APIs), or
the further subset of the above, that constitutes actual HTML markup.
To the web-designers and developers, the most useful definition is probably #3 — and it’s in this sense that Keith uses it, for example, in his excellent HTML5 for Web Designers. To the general public, #1 is the only definition that will even make sense. To everyone not concerned with actually writing the specification, #2 is entirely irrelevant. The W3C is just picking a definition to run with that is relevant to someone other than themselves.
So, going forward, what should we call the HTML5 markup? How about “HTML5 markup”?
If you follow anyone on Twitter who does anything with the web, you’ve no doubt seen this float across your feed a few dozen times this week:
An SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor…
Oh, how we laughed.
It does highlight one of the key problems of search on the web, though: that it’s fairly dumb. Even with Google’s now-famous pagerank system, a lot of searching must be done by a computer sorting through text: a computer that’s unaware that a bar is the same thing as a pub (made more complicated by a bar only being the same as a pub some of the time).
The SEO solution to this—trying to embed a thesaurus into the copy—is poor for two reasons. First, obviously, it’s ugly and reads poorly to humans, who are perfectly capable of understanding the groups of meaning that drive our languages (and who the sites are nominally for).
Second, however, it’s hitting the problem from the wrong end. The problem here isn’t broken websites, it’s broken search engines. It seems ludicrous even to approach a problem like this by trying to fix 100 million websites one at a time than to fix the handful of important search engines. As hard as natural language processing is, fixing a single point of failure is almost certainly easier than muddying up millions of them.
I don’t quite know how to express my feelings about the shooting this morning at Gabrielle Giffords town hall-ish gathering. For the moment, I’ll resist any impulse to point fingers—I’ve no idea what motivated the gunman, and see little profit in jumping to conclusions.
Instead, I’ll take heart from the many people praying and wishing the best for Rep. Giffords and the other victims of the attack. Perhaps we’ll take this opportunity to remind ourselves that our political opponents are people like us, with families and lives and dreams and who, yes, when pricked, do bleed.
It now comes out, convincingly and conclusively, that the 1998 study showing a link between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is not only wrong, but a complete fabrication, intended to support a lawsuit against the makers of the vaccine.
Andrew Wakefield and anyone else involved deserve to go to jail.
It is a convenient lie that we achieve success by hard work alone. (It’s also a very popular one, especially on the web.) We’re often uncomfortable with the role accident inevitably plays in our (or others’) success, crucial though it is.
There are accidents of birth, of association, of timing, and surely many others. If you happen to be in the right place at the right time, you can make amazing things happen—but it’s still very possible to do everything right and yet not succeed.
Pure luck surely isn’t the ticket, either: a quick look at all the disasters caused by winning the lottery suggests fortune alone can’t make a success. You must do a lot of hard work to be ready when luck catches you.
I say it’s a convenient lie, because thinking we’re in control—that, if only we work harder, we’ll be sure to achieve the success we want—is a strong motivator for us to keep at it. Working harder is surely a good thing. But remember fortune when you consider others: they may have worked plenty hard, only to be dealt a poor hand.
To put it another way: forgive your own flaws rarely, and others’ often.
Now I think about it, Assange & Zuckerberg are opposites: one threatens the ability of governments and corporations to keep secrets from the public; the other, the ability of the public to keep secrets from corporations.
“A Study in Emerald” is a short story by Neil Gaiman—a dark, Lovecraft-influenced take on the original Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet.” It’s lovely, and he’s now made it available free from his site, complete with authentic alt-Victorian advertisements.
I can’t quite shake this concept of avoiding directness and simplicity in design to arrive at a better product—counterintuitive as that ought to be. Along comes Barry Schwartz (who I still regret never taking a class from) with another angle on the issue.
Schwartz talks about societal reliance on rules and incentives “to spare us from thinking.” Overreliance on rules and incentives prevents disaster—but they do so by ensuring mediocrity. Incentives shape the way we think about questions, and encourage us to think in particular ways—usually ways that are self-interested.
Using incentives to shape behavior is a key area of thought and research in politics and economics, and also in design. We’re instructed to make our interfaces as clear and obvious and navigable as possible, because that’s what the user wants—as Steve Krug puts it, the user is screaming It’s the title of Krug’s book. “Don’t make me think!”
That doesn’t seem right to me. Surely we do want our users to think. We don’t (usually) want them to think about the interface—rather, we want them to think about what we’re selling (or what we’re saying). Is the “don’t make me think” model of design promoting a culture of users that gloss websites rather than engage with them?
We already know that users See, e.g., “How Little Do Users Read?”skim rather than engage content on the web, they gloss text instead of reading it, they bounce off to other pages quickly, following hyperlinks, advertisements, and any of the other distractions our designs (not to mention the browsers they sit in) provide. I’ve always thought (and I think it’s a common perception) that the best way to combat the myriad distractions of the modern web is by keeping the design from getting in the way of the content.
Maybe, instead, we should be placing the design squarely in the way of the content. Rather than simplifying the experience, we should make it more involved, drawing the user in through more complex interfaces. Such an interface must work not by staying out of the user’s way, but by engaging the user in a way that delights and fascinates without annoying or frustrating.
Aarron Walter discusses one way of approaching this with his talks on Emotional Interface Design—going beyond mere usability to create interfaces that are playful and fun. It’s not the only way. It may be as simple as For example, Thinking For A Living. breaking the flow of the text, or it may require more complicated arrangements.
An interface that gets out of the way of its user is not a bad interface. But let’s agree on on this: a design that’s so usable that its users are free to ignore the content it’s presenting, though not a disaster, is still a failure of design. Let’s make our users think.
