Offending Experts and Pleasing Everybody

Sat 10 Mar 200712:18 AM

An audio recording of my talk at Carson Systems’s Future of Web Apps conference has been posted online, so those interested in what I had to say but who couldn’t make it to the conference can now have a listen.

For myself, I’m pretty sure I’ll never plop it onto my iPod, as I hate hearing recordings of my voice. This probably runs counter to my interest in continually improving as a public speaker; it would do me some good to sit down and hear all my gaffes, my stuttering and my aimless diction. But I already subject myself to plenty of discomforts in the name of self-improvement, so this is one I’m just going to forgo for the time being.

I don’t mean to discourage you from listening to it, though. Several people told me my performance was ‘not all that bad’ and ‘definitely less painful than watching the slaughter of kittens.’ Go hear for yourself!

On a less disingenuously self-deprecating note, I wanted to share here a visual illustration of one of the things I mentioned in my talk. The idea is that, as interaction designers, we of course don’t want to offend any segment of the user base. But if you’re going to offend anyone, it should be experts and not beginners or intermediates.

Shorter, Faster, Better

Thu 8 Mar 200711:12 PM

Okay, it’s true, I don’t blog enough. I used to think I was a fairly active blogger, but looking over the frequency of my posts for the past few months, it’s pretty obvious that I only manage to publish two or three times a week. And if that weren’t evident enough before now, this complaint about infrequency is the one thing that I heard loud and clear yesterday, sprinkled in amongst all the gratifyingly supportive commentary on my decision to start running ads from The Deck and Authentic Jobs on this Web site.

The problem is that, as an amateur writer, I have a particular weakness: an inability to be brief. Almost without fail, when I sit down at my computer to ‘dash off’ a post that I think will run only two or three paragraphs, I end up writing six or eight of them. What should take me ten minutes too often turns into an hour and ten minutes, and so I often can’t find the time to even start.

What I want to avoid, naturally, is the idea of quantity trumping quality — I don’t want to delude myself that readers will continue to tune into Subtraction.com just to read, for instance, that tomorrow evening I’m heading out to Austin, Texas for the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where, on Sunday, I’ll be doing a power session and a panel on “High Class and Low Class and Web Design,” and that if you’re there as well, please come up and introduce yourself before Tuesday afternoon, when I fly back to New York. I mean, that’s what Twitter’s for, right?

Still, I will take the feedback to heart and try and post more often, and in doing so, I’ll do my best at striking some kind of balance between brevity, quality and quantity. Here’s an example: a post like this one would normally ramble on for another several paragraphs, but for tonight, it’s going to stop right here.

A Commercial Message

Thu 8 Mar 200712:27 AM

Some readers will have noticed that, starting several weeks ago, I began running job posts from Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs. This evening, for the first time, I’ve also started running ads from The Deck, Jim Coudal’s design-focused advertising network.

Truth be told, with the first move, I tried to sneak it through, without acknowledging it in any blog posts. Aside from the fact that they’re advertising, I figured that those job postings, being in black and white and being styled in such a way as to be very similar to the rest of the site, were visually innocuous. The ads from The Deck, however, are in color, and not so easily ignored.

I’m bracing for some scathing feedback from readers, so please, let me know how you feel if you find these changes to be offensive. We’ve been living with advertising on the Internet for over a decade now, but it’s still a topic that can inflame passions among reasonable people, and I respect that.

Illustrate Me for February

Mon 5 Mar 200709:28 PM

Pint-Sized Pictures

Wed 28 Feb 200708:28 PM

Cities as Applications

Tue 27 Feb 200709:39 PM

On my brief hop through London and Paris, I started thinking about the idea of touristic usability. Isn’t that an awesome term? It’s got eight syllables and I just made it up.

Aside from being a mildly absurd extension of our professional design vernacular, there’s actually a real idea behind this phrase: given any new city, there are certain things that should be easy for tourists to comprehend without assistance.

These things might include: how and when to use the subway or bus, how and where to buy fares for public transportation, how to make a call at a public telephone, how and where to flag a taxi, what to expect upon entering and leaving the airport, how and where to find postal services, how and where to find a police station, et cetera.

Of course, these are things you can find in any decent tourist’s guide, and any sensible traveler will pack such a book. But it struck me, while muddling through my first trip to London in seven years (and even, to an extent, on my third visit to Paris in less than twenty-four months), that these are things that should be inherently usable, as well.

Back from the Future (of Web Apps, and from Paris)

Sun 25 Feb 200703:48 PM

I start out with the best of intentions when I travel, but as you can see, I haven’t blogged nearly as much as I’d have liked to while on this trip — which, ideally, would have been more than zero posts. Tomorrow, it’s back to the States, winding up this London/Paris tour after just over a week, so I’m squeezing in this update.

London was lots of fun, but a little stressful; spreading a panel appearance, a solo talk and a half-day workshop across three days turns out to be one of the less relaxing ways to see a city, as it turns out. Still, I had a great time there, thanks in part to the warm hospitality of the folks at Carson Systems, who really know how to put on a terrific conference. It’s pretty amazing what their small team manages to pull off, and if you’re thinking of heading to their upcoming Future of Web Design or Future of Online Advertising conferences, you’ll be just as impressed, I’m sure of it.

I did a lot more kicking back here in Paris, where the food, wine and décor is a world apart. Amazing, is the word. No offense meant to London town, but this city gets further under my skin with each visit; it’s thoroughly — at times unconscionably — beautiful. I like it here a lot. If only I’d paid attention in eighth grade French class, I might actually be able to carry on a conversation here, as well. At the very least, I was able to be here for my father’s sixty-ninth birthday, which makes me very glad. All around, a worthy leg of the journey.

Okay, that’s it for now. I’m off to get one more ridiculously, ridiculously good meal. I’ll be back in the blogging seat within a day or two, and before too long, publishing some more substantive posts in which I’ll share some of what I presented in London.

Whereabouts, Thereabouts

Sat 17 Feb 200706:49 PM

At the moment I’m getting all my things together to head out to London for Carson Systems’ Future of Web Apps conference. I’m speaking there on Wednesday on the subject of “Managing User Interfaces,” and then giving a workshop on Thursday morning about designing with grids. It’s going to be great fun, but unfortunately, it’s sold out if you’re looking for tickets.

Also, while in London, I’ll be appearing on a panel assembled by Nico Macdonald called “Who Wants Tomorrow’s Papers?,” in which we discuss the state of online news design. That event will take place on Tuesday night, and it’s free, so come on out.

I’ll be turning this trip across the pond into a little getaway, too. On Thursday afternoon, I’ll fly to Paris for a few days to see my father and hang out with some friends. I’ll be back in New York a week from this Monday.

As always, my schedule on these trips is going to be pretty tight, so I apologize in advance if I can’t catch up with folks in London or Paris, though I will try. Posts here at Subtraction.com will be somewhat erratic too, if they happen at all… though that will also be due, in part, to the fact that just thirty minutes ago, with only an hour left to leave for the airport, the hard drive in my laptop died. Crashed. Kaput. I’ll be trying to resuscitate it in London, but the prognosis is grim. Ain’t that always the way?

Radio Free Pledge Drives

Thu 15 Feb 200712:23 AM

My local public radio station, WNYC, is in the midst of its winter pledge drive. You know, that all too familiar time of year in which they interrupt “Morning Edition,” “On the Media,” or any of my other favorite radio programs to ask for financial contributions from listeners — over and over and over again.

Ever since I was a kid, when I was watching “Sesame Street” on PBS, I’ve lamented the necessary but irredeemably boring nature of public broadcasting’s pledge drives. I find them incredibly difficult to listen to, and I often turn off the television or radio entirely during the weeks when they’re on the air.

A while ago, I had this brainstorm: once a viewer or listener makes a pledge, the station ships out a special gadget that tunes into a members-only frequency — one in which the station broadcasts without the interruptions of its pledge drive. Parallel programming, in essence. If that option were available, I’d pledge money on the first day of the drive, for sure, and I bet lots of other people would, too. The ability to forgo the tedium of a week’s worth of nagging shouldn’t be underestimated.