Archives

If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software

Enterprise software, it can hardly be debated, is pretty bad stuff. The high-dollar applications that businesses use to run their internal operations (everything that falls under human resources, typically, but also accounting, communications and, at one time or another, just about everything else) are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code. If you work at a big company and you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like file an expense report, make changes to your salary withholdings — or, heck, if you’ve ever tried to apply for a job at a big company — then you’ve probably encountered these confounding user experiences. And you probably cursed out loud.

This is partly because enterprise software rarely gets critiqued the way even a US$30 piece of shareware will. It doesn’t benefit from the rigor of a wide and varied base of users, many of whom will freely offer merciless feedback, goading and demanding it to be better with each new release. Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users. Given that hothouse environment, it’s only natural that the result is often very strange.

Continue Reading …

+

Known Pleasures

ControlSpeaking of control, it’s only a funny coincidence that I gave a new talk with that title the same week that Anton Corbijn’s biopic about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis was released. That film is also called “Control,” and while it has nothing to do with design, it’s neverthelesss an entertaining if imperfect movie. I saw it on Monday night at New York’s Film Forum theater.

I’m a big fan of Joy Division as well as the post-Joy Division work of New Order, who formed in the aftermath of Curtis’ untimely suicide. But I’ve always been skeptical of the cultish fascination with Curtis’ demise, which has always seemed to add an uneasily pat bookend to his briefly prolific career. The facts of his death, while undeniably tragic, have always veered too far into the territory of convenient mythology for me.

Continue Reading …

+

Look What the Leopard Dragged In

Mac OS X 10.5 LeopardWhen I sat down to write this entry about the recently revealed final product details for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I nearly described the operating system upgrade as being ‘much anticipated.’ But then I wondered, “Is it really much-anticipated?” No, in fact. The iPhone was this year’s darling, and Leopard’s so-so feature list doesn’t seem to hold much potential for grabbing the spotlight back. It may also be no accident that the product’s animal namesake also happens to be the smallest of the of the four so-called ‘big cats.’

Continue Reading …

+

Open Design Positions at NYTimes.com

Just a note: there are two openings in my design group at NYTimes.com. Before I get to describing them, I want to please ask those of you who are interested to apply through the links I’ve provided below; please don’t email me directly. It will be faster to route your résumé through our human resources department via the links. Trust me.

The first open job is a permanent, full-time position for which I’ve been working on getting approval for a long time: online news designer. This is a role intended to create design solutions for the news — for our home page most often, but also on the site’s various section fronts and other articles. If you’re the kind of person who has what it takes to design something like our recent “Choking on Growth” feature from start to finish, from visual design to code, then you should apply for this job.

The second open job is for a full-time design technologist. That’s our title for what others call ‘developers’ or ‘builders,’ people with that special mix of design sensibility and technological skill who live for harnessing the power of XHTML, CSS and other client-side technologies in service to superior user experiences. Just a warning: you’ll be replacing an extremely gifted design technologist on our team who’s moving on to a new opportunity within the company, so expectations will be high. That’s not to discourage anyone from applying; I just want to emphasize that we’re looking for top shelf people.

In fact, if I might offer a supplemental note, we’re pretty much only looking for top shelf people — and for people who are fun to work with. Modesty aside, this is a great design environment largely because the shared talent and camaraderie are so conducive to good practice. Not only would I stake our talent against just about any interaction design team anywhere (whether an independent shop or another in-house group), but I’d say we have a better time doing the work than just about anyone else, too. There, that’s my pitch!

Continue Reading …

+

New York to Boston to Denver, and Back Again

That was a busy weekend. Here’s how I spent it.

I woke up at about 4:00a on Friday morning and flew to Boston for the Society of News Designers conference, which was great fun. In our session just before lunchtime, Tom Bodkin and I had a very lively public debate about the merits and flaws of digital design, which I think some members of the audience recorded. I’m only sorry I couldn’t have stayed longer.

Then it was off to Denver for the AIGA National Design Conference. I got just a few hours of sleep that night before reporting to the impressive and immense Denver convention center (they have an awesome sculpture of a bear giving drivers-by the ass in front of the building) the next morning, to be introduced for my solo talk by the extremely classy Kurt Andersen, who asked me some sharp follow-up questions after I was done. It was a little frightening, too, to speak for twenty-five minutes in front of some 2,500 attendees, but I’m proud to say that I did not mess up, at least.

Continue Reading …

+

Crumpled Up

Lately, I’ve been trying to turn down invitations to collaborate on other people’s projects because I feel that I can ill afford the time. With four speaking appearances coming up in the next six weeks and no shortage of other distractions, I’ve been cramming like mad in preparation.

But not long ago, Chris Vivion and John Loomis of Blue Eyes Magazine asked me to design title cards for two of their routinely beautiful online exhibits of documentary photography: “Borderland” by Carolyn Drake, a look at Ukraine at a crossroads between the traditional and the modern; and “City of Fathers” by Dan Seltzer, a visit to Hebron, where a few hundred Jewish settlers live amidst 150,000 Palestinians. It was just the kind of challenge that I like: it revolved around substantive content and entailed a conceptual mode of thinking — illustration, of a sort.

Continue Reading …

+

The Cost of Unchanging Seasons

New York YankeesWhether it’s illogical, delusional or arrogant, fans of the New York Yankees (including me) expect to see the team win the World Series every year. So it’s frustrating when, as happened on Monday night, they come up head-scratchingly short, losing this time in a first-round series against the Cleveland Indians by three games to one.

Year after year, Yankee management spends exorbitantly to assemble a roster of some of the most formidable, on-paper talent available. So to watch that talent expire ignobly in October while swinging aimlessly, pitching stalely, and shuffling across the field in an exhausted, uninspired pantomime of their regular season selves… well, relative to their payroll and their expected potential, it’s frustrating, to say the least. (Though more than a few of you out there, I’m sure, take some delight in it!)

Though each team that’s beaten them in Octobers past rightfully earned their victories it’s hard to deny there’s something fundamentally wrong about the Yankees’ approach. I won’t pretend to have definitive answers to what ails them (or to whether manager Joe Torre should go, or whether third baseman Alex Rodriguez should stay), but there is something I’ve noticed that strikes me as inherently troublesome: the Yankees have an untenably high cost of change.

Continue Reading …

+

The Music I’m Not Listening To

Not since shortly after college have I felt particularly comfortable with broadcasting my taste in music. To be sure, I have deep-seated biases towards certain artists and musical genres and probably no shortage of opinion on what ‘good music’ is, so it’s not as if I would be at a loss for words.

But by and large I’ve come to learn that music can be such a misleading indicator of who a person is. Forming an idea of someone’s character based on his or her musical preferences is a bit like meeting a person in a nightclub; what’s communicated over the din of loudly played music and under the cover of strategically dimmed lighting is often not an entirely accurate portrait of who that person is in the light of day.

Continue Reading …

+

That’s the Last.fm Time

Last.fmI’d just like to know: how many of you out there have been burned — or, I guess, delighted — by recommendation engines? You know, when you buy one product, a mercenarily convenient notice will present itself with a recommendation for another similarly minded product that you might like to buy as well.

Amazon.com, of course, is the most famous online retailer who’s implemented this ‘upsell’ technique for just about anything they sell, but I’m specifically talking about recommendations for music. By and large, I’ve found the recommendations engine at Netflix to be very satisfactory, as there’s something more easily quantifiable about offering up movies than music, tastes for which can be so capriciously subjective.

By contrast, I finally decided to give Last.fm a try, and I’ve been more or less fully dissatisfied with the results so far. I’d heard a lot of good things about the service, which monitors the songs you play in iTunes (and through other computer-centric music playing methods) and presents recommendations based on your listening habits. I’ve been impressed with almost none of the bands that it’s shown me, having already been familiar with most of them or finding the others to be almost universally bland.

I guess I’m feeling particularly burned because, in a fit of optimism when I first started trying the service, I took Last.fm’s word for it and actually purchased one of the albums that was suggested to me: Rilo Kiley’s “Under the Blacklight.” I don’t know what I was thinking; this band is so boring I almost fell asleep typing out their name. From now on, when I go looking for new tunes, it’s only supercilious, human-penned music criticism for me.

Continue Reading …

+

Live and in Person

It’s going to be a busy few weeks coming up for me: next Friday morning I’m flying to Boston for an appearance at the annual Society of News Designers conference. I’ll be on stage with New York Times Assistant Managing Editor Tom Bodkin — who is the top dog when it comes to design at The Times.

The joint appearance is being billed as something of a “print versus digital” face-off, but in actuality Tom and I get along very well. He’s a brilliant guy whose seen The Times through more than a handful of major changes over the years, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him since I started working there. All the same, he and I have sometimes dramatically divergent approaches to our respective domains, and so our talk should be a lively one — if nothing else, Tom is deeply opinionated about the roles, responsibilities and rights of designers. This is a rare opportunity to see one of the most influential designers in media take me to task for all the compromises we make in the name of Web design. Come watch me sweat.

Unfortunately, I’ll only be in Boston for half a day, as I’m flying to Denver that evening to attend AIGA Next, the organization’s biennial design conference. I’ve been lucky enough to have been asked to give a talk on the main stage which is a very flattering honor. In hopes of living up to the occasion, I’ve been working away on a brand new talk that wraps up much of my current philosophy about design and digital media. It’ll post it here soon after the conference.

Then, later in the month, I’ll be in Philadelphia with the Adaptive Path gang for their MX East conference. On Mon 22 Oct I’ll be giving a talk about my experience at The Times, hopefully offering some valuable insights on building a creative team. It’s going to be fun, but really, this is my chance to see some of the terrific speakers that Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett have assembled.

A little further off, in November, I’ll also be running a workshop at Carson Systems’ Future of Web Design conference, making its first appearance in New York City. Back in February, I spoke at Carson’s Future of Web Apps conference in London and had a great time, so this should be at least as fun. Oh, the topic of the workshop is, if you can believe it, grids, though it will be a revised and expanded version of the talks I’ve given earlier in the year.

Continue Reading …

+