A New Canvas

Fever pitch would best describe the current rumor and excitement level going on right now about the new Apple Tablet/Slate/flat-thing-a-ma-bob that’s set to be announced on January 27th. I’m excited about it sure, a touch skeptical that it’ll be a huge game changer, but a big part of me really hopes it is.

I’m sure the hardware is going to be sexy, I’m confident Apple is going to come up with a way to do some sort of text entry, maybe not for your next novel, but it’ll work. If this sucker is wildly successful and sells like hotcakes, what gets me excited is that there’s going to be a new way to design digital content.

This new Apple device, in addition to whatever else they may be planning, could create a new ecosystem that gives people a reason to purchase periodical type content again. To spend a little extra for something exclusive, for the video and the audio additions, but also because it’s designed better.

Why would people want this?

It’s two simple words—premium content. Think HBO or Showtime. The Wall Street Journal has been able to carve out a nice little niche on the web too. The problem is people think of that content as free, and it works well that way.

That said, I miss reading the newspaper and beautifully laid out magazines, something a bit more researched and without that feel that I need to click the next item in my feed reader. I don’t want to deal with the hassle of an actual paper or the environmental impact of all that waste.

I want the best of both worlds. Beautifully laid out content, complete with audio and video, but delivered to me automatically on a device that’s designed to read on. Not something that’s already has too many alerts and notifications to pull me away from reading, watching or listening.

What makes this different then just a fancy website?

First, just go check out this Mag+ concept by Bonnier R&D. Still not convinced?

With a device like this, the content would be designed to be consumed on that specific device size (whatever it is) and not have to worry about fixed vs. fluid layouts and IE6 like designers have to do on the web. It could have full CSS3 support, no cross browser javascript woes and a much larger set of native type to choose from pre-loaded on the device.

Best of all, all the web designers out there would already know how to build for it because the content that will be produced for this new device will use HTML/CSS/Javascript and wouldn’t require them to learn Objective-C. Sure, it’ll probably offer the ability for developers to write apps in that too, but I’m talking about the designers formatting the content to be consumed on the device.

And then, the big one, getting paid for your content directly instead of relying on advertising with some sort of subscription model that’s built right into iTunes where Apple is already storing credit cards.

Why would content producers want this?

Clearly the big newspapers are struggling, hell they whole media industry is struggling to sustain themselves on the internet. If Apple is able to change the game, this might help give them a revenue model they’ve been searching for since they haven’t been able to come up with something better than drowning their sites with ads. Of course, Apple wouldn’t be opposed to taking a cut to provide a new model they haven’t been able to come up with yet.

In the end, I’m less concerned about all the specifications of the new device and more excited about the potential it can offer designers. Better tools and a canvas for richer experiences, a revenue model that gives content producers a better way to create and consumers higher quality, beautiful content.

Unfounded Anger

In the design community there often seems to be this need, or this want to immediately critique a design. Critique might be too kind of a word, it’s more of a hate on a design. To immediately call something out as terrible, wrong, ridiculous, stupid or just plain dumb. In offices I’ve worked in I often hear people immediately yell out that something is “clowntown” or laugh about how terrible a design is or how horrendous a drop shadow might be.

It’s not just limited to the office, online people are abhorring some new redesign, or how some small design tweak on a site is ruining everything.

This makes me sad.

It’s also not helpful to the community or design in general. I’ve been trying to figure out why web designers as group do this so often. My hypotheses so far:

1. Immaturity. Our profession is still very, very young and people in it our often very young. Few have had formal design training, and even fewer in a university setting and the ones that have often aren’t the really talented web designers out there. Our profession is so new that the pioneers didn’t have classes to take, and so haven’t had any formal training. Which, in turn, means they haven’t spent much time in any formal critique settings. Critiquing when the end result is positive is fantastic and a critical piece of the design process, but calling something out as stupid just because you’re angry isn’t.

2. Speed of delivery. Twitter, Facebook and blogging all give us the tools to immediately call someone out and blast it to 100, 1,000 or even 10,000+ people in just a few seconds. The speed at which you can say something is shocking so take a little more time to be clear.

3. A desire to seem intelligent or thoughtful about design. It’s the thinking that if you talk louder than the person next to you you’re going to come off smarter than the next guy. I don’t think most people do this consciously, but designers want their voices heard and they want to prove that they know what they’re talking about. It’s quicker to hate on a design picking out all the little things that should have been done than to just do something great yourself.

To be clear, it’s not actual design critique that’s a problem, it’s the quick comments and tweets that do more harm than good. I just don’t see how sending out hasty rants and complaints help us as a community create better designs. We’re just coming off as whiny and not solving any problems.

Instead we should be raising the level of debate in our community to produce and talk about designs at a higher level.

How can we do this?

1. Tweak before you speak. Just a small rephrasing of a remark about some new redesign can make a huge difference. Turn “OMG what the hell were they thinking with this site. Total fucking clowntown!” into something like “Looks like they missed their audience completely site feels bland a bit undersaturated and the type just doesn’t quite fit.”

2. Know your radius. You’ve got 20,000 followers, know that you’re going to blast a huge amount of people who respect your point of view. Be sure you’re clear and aren’t firing off without considering the impact it’ll have to the community.

3. Stop loving the sensational. Our community loves to jump on the bandwagon of something sensational. When Jason Fried publicly rails on Get Satisfaction or Merlin Mann’s enraged about Twit Shirt or John Gruber writes about the Apple’s app store people love to pile on. We place too much emphasis on the negative, the sensational, the bad, and not on conversations that help everyone get better. Imagine what great work people would be doing if they weren’t a bit afraid of the community jumping out and hating on them for something. Imagine if all of these “followers” were creators. Instead of getting caught up in the next mob lynching, they were busy creating something they truly love for us all to use.

I’m not looking to be a hall monitor, or suggesting that people shouldn’t be angry from time to time, but right now, at this stage in web design’s evolution, we’ve swung too far away from a positive discussion.

Let’s raise the level of debate and critique across the web, not just to be nice or to feel good about design, but because in the end it’ll produce better design by everyone.

Outliers

Last week I attended a day of the UX Week conference and was lucky enough to listen to a talk from Bernhard Seefeld and Elizabeth Windram from the Google Maps team. During their talk they mentioned something that perked my interest. It didn’t sound like the same old, same old when I hear people talk about user experience.

They design for the power user.

Now they backpedaled a bit later when they started talking about how they design for the power user without the expense of the novice or new user, but it got me thinking about one of my favorite topics—outliers.

Mainly because I am one. For those who don’t know: I’m tall—6‘9” tall. The world isn’t built for someone like me.

I spent a whole weekend sitting in 30+ cars just to find one I fit in. It became immediately clear which car companies designed their interiors for an outlier like myself. Ford, Honda and Toyota didn’t even have a car on their lot that I fit in comfortably. I ended up with a Volvo C30 a small two door hatchback. Which, when I tell people usually returns a surprised look, and a quick,

“You fit in that thing?”

Yep. The size of the car has little to do with it. It comes down to basic combination of dash/steering column layout and seat positioning. It’s inherently a design problem. Volvo was thinking of an outlier (myself) without sacrificing quality for everyone else. In fact, it’s a better design because of it. It’s not just that there’s more space for me, but they took the extra time on all the little things in the interior. There’s a floating console and a nearly clutter free dash. To be honest, I have no idea if by Volvo making their dash work for me truly caused these other design details of the interior to be better, but I’ve designed enough to be willing to bet it did. Their focus on making enough leg and head room for those like me spilled over into their design process as a whole.

It’s this focus on these outliers that make a design truly great. Making sure things are accessible for the blind or the deaf, adding in keyboard shortcuts so that it’s easier to browse through photos, or making that navigation highlight look clearer so a user doesn’t get lost.

Now these things on their own are valuable, but the collateral benefits are why you should do them. If you were designing a car, worrying about extra leg room might make you rethink the entire console. Making a design polished isn’t achieved by making it work for your mom or the average user. You end up with something average.

Make a design truly great for the outliers and you make the experience great for everyone.

Go big or go home

Welcome to a bigger, clearer, and a fresh new design of T Incorporated. My friend Mike Davidson likes to call this T Incorporated bad vision edition. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but with this redesign I pushed myself to really go big and bring the content forward. I wanted to stop hiding behind all of the meta data of my old design and push to have my work front and center. With my first iteration of T Incorporated a few years back, I was so excited to show all of the various information about the data I was pulling in. As a result the content itself started to get lost in the shuffle. I became far to enamored with what I could do instead of what I wanted to be presenting or letting the content stand on its own.

This design is a response to that but in the end I wanted to address a few main things:

1. Make the site easier to read and hopefully encourage myself to write more
2. Give myself more flexibility with the posts themselves. I often found I wanted to put a large photo in a post but the previous design didn’t allow it.
3. Simplify without blindly removing valuable content or meta-data
4. Highlight the photos even more by putting them on a dark background

This has been a nights and weekends project for a few months now, today was just time to launch it and move on. Designing for myself is such a difficult process, and in the end, just launching it is often the hardest part. There’s plenty of little things that I quite like with the design. The large photos on the dark background, the photo crop in the stream, as well as the stream itself and the large icons that denote the various sections. I also pushed my javascript skills a bit and you can now use the arrow keys (in Safari only for now) to flip through photos, posts, the stream, etc. It’s a hidden feature but one I absolutely love for myself.

The design is still powered by Django, bringing in my content via API’s from Flickr, Twitter, Delicious and others (hopefully Facebook someday here soon).

It’s not a massive shift, but one that pays homage to the old design while prioritizing the content first.

As always, I’d love to hear what people think!