4. Rebuttals and responses.
This is the fourth post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:
When an essay is released into the wild, its life begins. People read it; then they say something about it. It used to be that you would handwrite a letter to the editor and send it in the mail. These days, though, commentary takes the form of content on the internet, ranging from emails to comments to blog posts to tweets. But that is just the first step. People can respond to the responses; authors can think about these responses, and revise their own work accordingly. That’s how discourse works, and I think it’s a very good thing. And while this all sounds pretty elementary, it’s hard to get right, to encourage new ideas and insights. With Distance, I want to support and nurture it however I can.
When a new issue is released, I’ll be paying attention to what people say about it. If a response is thoughtful or insightful, I’ll reach out to its author and ask them to reprint or excerpt it. Each of Distance’s issues will have a digital edition, and bundled with this (and posted to the issue’s page on Distance’s site) will be an ever-increasing, forever updated corpus of interesting commentary from other people. Anybody will be able to respond, including the authors themselves, so hopefully this will create an interesting conversation with many different threads. Distance’s essays are meant to last, so the longer they’re in the wild, more discussion will accumulate around them.
I think this is a great way to moderate a conversation around big questions, and I graciously hope you’ll participate.
3. Citation technique.
This is the third post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:
Distance exists in many forms. There’s going to be a book, of course, but we’re also releasing a digital bundle for PDF, ePub, and Kindle formats. The PDF is a different page size than the book, so every single format is going to paginate differently. And because journal citations usually go by pagination, this poses a problem: how do we know we’re referring to the right place in the text?
The Bible actually does this fairly well. You know that John 3:16 is going to be at the same place between differing copies of the same translation (i.e., King James version) of the Bible, no matter what page number it may be on.
So in this spirit, but holiness notwithstanding, Distance doesn’t have page numbers; instead, it has paragraph numbers at the beginning of each paragraph, which direct readers to the right place in the essay. In the PDF and physical book, these are to the left of each paragraph. Kindle’s and ePub’s paragraphs begin with them. And in ePub, Kindle, and PDF, each of these is represented by a permalink that can be used in a specific citation.
We know this isn’t entirely novel, but maybe it is for interactive texts. And we’re well aware that it proscribes a specific citation style that “breaks” traditional citation schemata, which may frustrate some people – but we didn’t take this decision lightly, and think it’s for the betterment of our writing to generalize citation across analog and digital platforms. It’s increasingly unreasonable to assume that readers will keep their content in just one form, and we’re well aware of that, and trying to account for that in the best way that is as reverent to the text and the reader’s habits as possible, meeting everyone halfway.
We take a page at the beginning of each issue of Distance to discuss how citation works for that particular medium, and to advise people on the best way to cite Distance’s essays so that readers and researchers can find what they need as conveniently as possible. We hope this may be helpful for your own research efforts, but we’re always thinking what we can do to improve, so we seek feedback on what works and what doesn’t work for you.
2. Editorial strategy.
This is the second post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:
Mandy Brown has discussed the nature of editorial strategy in many publications, and when I first contacted her about Distance, that was the first thing she asked me. So I’d like to talk a little bit about what I’m doing with authors’ essays for Distance. Everybody is a unique snowflake, so this process has never been precisely followed for any particular essay – but going into it, this is what I tend to ask for and expect from people.
First, a proposal. Write a paragraph-long pitch: what you care about and how you hope to write about it. This can be something as short as:
I want to use the history of video games to justify that gamification and virtual currencies are damaging the form.
Or it can be longer. The more the better, really, because it helps convey that you’re passionate about what you do, and that you’ve already started to think through some of the details.
Second, we talk about it. We’ll get on a Skype call or IM or whatever and I’ll throw some ideas out there, and we’ll bat things around.
A couple of weeks later, you’ll have finished the outline. Build an argument, tell me what you plan to write about, and try to fit it in a couple of pages. Some people feel more comfortable simply writing the introduction; other folks are rigorous, providing a proper Harvard-style outline. Do whatever works for you; I’m not here to impose structure on the planning. Then I revise the outline, we might talk about it a little more, and you start writing. Around this time, I’ll also dump a ton of research on you in the form of books, articles, blog posts, and academic papers, so that you can start to research things better and frame your argument more cogently.
Fourth, the half-completed draft. This gives me enough ground to stand on and recommend some ways to build your argument. Often I will say “this part needs a few sentences of examples that prove what you are trying to say.” Or: “now that you have finished half of the essay, consider this direction to bring it home.” Or: “move this part up here.” Or: “cut this paragraph, it doesn’t help.” High-level stuff. I don’t proofread much at this point, but sometimes I’ll give in to my grammar snob impulses.
Fifth, the three-fourths completed draft. Sometimes missing an intro and conclusion. Sometimes missing one major part. Doesn’t matter. Things are taking shape. We could start proofreading and doing more significant edits, and it would be passable, but not great yet, and we are here to make something that is great. No matter how we get there, I tend to work better with more collaboration and iteration, and I try to be nice about it, too.
Sixth, the complete first draft. Fewer high-level edits, and proofreading is starting to kick into gear.
Then we bat drafts around until the deadline or we collapse from exhaustion. Push it until it’s great. Shine it until you can see your reflection in it. Make it the best thing you’ve written in your life. That’s what I aspire to.
Maybe this is the wrong or unconventional way to do things. I don’t know. It will probably change in the future. Sometimes it happens organically, but it’s okay if it doesn’t. Today, though, writing this, it feels right, knowing what I know.
1. Essays and rants.
In my work, the difference between a rant and an essay is: an essay offers a solution. This does not make rants any better or worse than essays; it just makes them different in their scope, their goals, and their strategy around research. An excellent rant is Bret Victor’s A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, which meant to discuss the state of the art and why he thinks it’s bad – but the lack of solutions came from the subject matter, because it was discussing theoretical interfaces and notional directions for future research. All fair ground.
Essays take a confident stand that a certain idea is (or isn’t) preferable within a set of prescribed bounds. Rewriting Bret’s essay, it would say something like “touch interfaces are preferable right now for this reason, and going ahead we need to start researching in this specific direction for this other reason.” Whether or not this diminishes the quality of his writing isn’t at hand; the real question is how much it changes the form of his argument.
If Bret were to take that particular tack, he would have to find different sources for research; he would have to build his argument in different ways, likely citing more real-world examples than conceptual videos; and, most importantly, the conclusions would be far more closed-ended. I believe there is a place for rants – in fact, I think Bret’s rant was one of the best pieces of writing to be released in 2011 – but that is not the goal of Distance’s essays.
Distance’s essays – and yes, that is why I call them essays – are meant to take a confident, unambiguous stand on an issue, and they are meant to back those up with enough research to state their case without coming off as flame bait or invective. In a very high-level way, that is how I edit essays: they should say “I believe this, and here is the context, and thus here is some research, and knowing that, there is why.” So that’s four points – three and a half, if you’re picky – that all contribute to the central conceit of each essay. This form isn’t new, but it is something we seem to have largely forgotten in our field, and so the broader goal of Distance is to shed light on that form, signify why it’s important, and prove by doing that it can help us out. It’s an attempt to write better, and to encourage readers to read better, too.
Distance.
We don’t write well enough. Linkbait invective spreads quickly because it angers people, in turn prompting a degradation in the quality of writing. People write opinions unchecked and unedited, leading to thoughtless arguments and shoddy research.
We don’t read well enough. We deal with problems of curation and moderation, which both stem from finding trusted sources to sift through the morass for us. We don’t focus on writing of substantial length, and we place rants on a pedestal, even though they don’t offer any solutions.
We don’t talk about writing well enough. To be sure, we’ve made inroads here, but I don’t think it goes sufficiently far. Comments aren’t moderated well enough on most sites, and thriving communities are difficult to build.
I want to create a space where we can do all three of these things better, so I’ve spent the past few months working with several others on the beginning. Presenting Distance: a quarterly journal for long-form essays about design and technology.
The first issue has essays from Ben Jackson, Vitorio Miliano, and Jon Whipple; you can read more about the content and authors at the journal’s aforelinked site. Subscriptions and single issues will be available, in both print and “digital bundle” (PDF, Kindle, and ePub) form.
But, the most important thing: Distance is on Kickstarter, and because Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, this can’t happen without your support. If you’d like to follow along, Distance is on Twitter, too.
This represents the first step in a very long process that, by design, cannot involve only me. I don’t make Distance; I help other people make Distance. So now that we’ve begun the beginning, I’m tremendously excited to see where this takes us, and I can’t wait to share all of this with every single one of you.
The timeline and the periphery.
When Twitter was first created, you could only write 140 characters of your own choosing. Now there are all sorts of other services that tweet on your own behalf, often without your noticing: Foursquare posts your checkins, Instagram posts your images, and all sorts of in-beta services tweet that you signed up for an invite. On the other hand, there are other apps that primarily exist to post your own content. The former I’ll call peripheral clients; the latter I’ll call timeline clients.
In order to make my timeline easier to read and understand, and in order to make my Twitter experience more about the things that I value in it, I run a timeline client that allows me to remove all tweets that are posted by specific client names. So I browse Twitter such that I can only read timeline clients.
As a result, my client-based filter list is formidable:
- Amazon
- Camera+
- Chill
- Colossal
- Fab iPhone
- Flickr
- foursquare
- Geeklist Inc
- Goodreads
- goscoville.com
- Gowalla
- HootSuite
- Instagram on iOS
- iTunes Ping
- Kinetik iOS
- last.fm
- LastfmLoveTweet
- Mashable Follow
- Mixel on iOS
- Momentile
- MyZeus
- Nike Application
- Nike+ GPS
- NYTimes on iOS
- Ohours.org
- Oink App
- Paper.li
- Posterous
- Rdio
- Readmill
- Retro Camera for Android
- RunKeeper
- Songkick
- SoundTracking
- SoundTracking on iOS
- Stamped for iPhone
- StumbleUpon
- The Visitor Widget
- Tumblr
- Turntable.fm
- Tweekly.fm
- Tweet Button
- twitterfeed
- Untappd
- With
- WordPress.com
- Words with Friends on iOS
- Year in Status
- Yelp
Thankfully, client-based blocking is effective at removing peripheral clients while preserving timeline clients.
Some scattered explanations:
- The worst offenders by far are foursquare and Instagram. They comprise around 20% of my unfiltered timeline. Draw your own conclusions.
- HootSuite: I know you can turn off the little ow.ly bar that appears on shortened links, but I disagree with its premise, and the whole client just skeezes me out writ large. Blocking HootSuite, a timeline client, poses the biggest risk that I’ll miss out on insightful, volitionally posted tweets from other people.
- Tweet Button: I don’t think link sharing should be reduced to the cognitive level of starring a tweet, and I prefer to read people’s thoughts on why they share the things they share, and what they have to say about it.
- Google and Facebook: Filtering these clients preserves only tweets from people who are posting specifically to Twitter. I don’t have a Facebook account and I never sign into Google+ (and would delete my account there if I didn’t think G+ accounts will become compulsory in the coming months).
- I turn off retweets from the vast majority of folks that I follow. I prefer to read what they have to say.
- My timeline client has hashtag blocking, but not string blocking, so I can only block e.g. conference hashtags that begin with a #. I desperately wish I could block any free text, e.g. 4sq, @Fab, deck.ly, rd.io, Herman Cain.
- When I see a new peripheral client hit my timeline, I block it. This doesn’t take much effort to maintain.
I feel like following somebody on Twitter has way too much importance attached to it, partly because we end up following every other internet-related product that they use as a result. We see all their posts on Instagram and Flickr and all their checkins and all the things that they Oinked or ifttted or whatever else.
But I want to keep my focus on what they have to say, and what we have to communicate to each other. Bringing excellent, like-minded people together is what makes Twitter great, and cutting out peripheral clients is a good way for me to do that better.
The Eatery’s first-run experience.
Massive Health released their first product today: an iPhone app that appears to rate your meals, hot-or-not style, called The Eatery. Its signup flow touches on a few things I enjoy thinking about:
1. The “several page tutorial” pattern. Users can’t continue without paging through a set of instructions:

Long content scrolls, forcing horizontal and vertical swipes, but the team did a good job accounting for this by cutting the text at the fold:

This sort of pattern is especially common in iOS apps: they adopt the · · · · · · that you see on the home screen, and ask the user to page through a brief slideshow to learn the program. This is in contrast to the first-run experience where the “blank slate” state is annotated with arrows and suggestions for where to go. To-do list app Orchestra does this quite well.
I’ve seen the introductory slideshow used quite well (my favorite is probably Thicket, although its slideshow is put out of the way of the user). That said, I tend to favor the latter approach because it puts the working interface in front of users faster, which may decrease the bounce rate after the app has been downloaded.

2. Putting a form in a tutorial that appears like a gallery. I don’t know if these multi-page instructional demos enforce the expectation that users will treat them as if they were image galleries. On the fourth page (of six), the above form appears, encouraging users to select any sort of dietary restriction. Will users expect this? I was thrown off by it. Is it required? I couldn’t tell at first glance.
3. Checkboxes on a single select dialog. This might work better as a radio button, but I’ll concede that it would look less nice from a visual standpoint, and it may be less likely to invite interaction. Nonetheless, I want the ability to select multiple options, with “No restrictions” clearing all other responses (and a response elsewhere clearing “No restrictions” accordingly), as I can imagine a world wherein a handful of folks are (for example) both vegan and gluten-free.

4. Interesting copy. “Don’t watch this video. It’s boring.” Reverse psychology carries a small risk with first run experiences. My doctor is boring; this app is supposed to not be boring. I’m left wondering what the “Feed” is supposed to be. This could be solved with some copy like Instapaper’s first-run experience, which replaces an ostensibly blank list with some instructions on adding articles to read later.
The tappity noise.
One benefit of touch interfaces: the subtle variations of keyboard layouts. Used to be that if you wanted a bespoke interface for your product, you would have to make it in hardware. One of the more half-assed examples: putting stickers on the keys of your keyboard, to indicate some sort of crazy remapping. Folks who went long with the concept ended up with all sorts of crazy stuff, though, like fake gas pedals that controlled driving simulators. Either way, such hardware tweaks affect the entire platform, not just one program that you use on it.
Now, of course, the screen is the interface for so many apps, so you can get away with some more interesting one-offs, such as Wolfram Alpha’s complex keyboard that takes up the entire screen:

In fact, Wolfram Alpha has such a large character set that they provide a unique control, at the bottom left of the custom half of the keyboard, that shows pagination for Greek and astronomical variables:


On the iPad, there’s the row of keys above the standard keyboard in iA Writer:

More subtly, Echofon swaps the Return key for @ and #:

Taking away keys always provides a small risk that users will hurt for what was lost. Echofon’s team appears to know this, because selecting “123” at bottom left switches the keys back to Return:

I haven’t seen a whole lot of people dwelling on the flexibility and freedom that software keyboards can afford us now, but I think it’s really important, both from designers’ standpoints (any such change is dramatic, upsetting the norms of the platform, and shouldn’t be taken lightly) and users’ (affording more contextually appropriate input, with fewer cumbersome kludges to get there).
What other customizations have you seen towards this end?
Carrier.
Now, this conversation just blew up on Twitter, and it contains a lot of somewhat-related issues that probably need to be handled separately, to the point where they could each spawn an individual blog post. But let’s be reductive and brief here, and try to organize what we’re all thinking about, as it concerns the publication of excellent writing on the internet, possibly in some sort of “periodical”:
Thematic issues
Wherein the content is deliberately arranged, however abstractly, around a specific topic. This usually benefits the content, but it takes more editorial effort to pull off.
The sporadic trickle vs. the fixed schedule
E.g., blog posts vs. issues of a magazine. Or kind of like how K10K worked with blending the two models. This affects readers’ expectations: people anticipate future issues, or they anticipate the possibility of future trickles of content. The anticipation imposes expectations on publishers, who are obligated to publish a certain amount of content on a rigid schedule, or who may be obligated to explain potential lapses in blogging. As publishers, this boils down to a customer service issue, in the event that a deadline happens to slip. As readers, this frequently enforces the belief (whether true or untrue) that we have to read a given issue’s content before the next issue is released.
The corpus vs. the conversation
I care very deeply about the idea that a periodical can build up a massive stash of useful, insightful content over time. Emigre did this. McSweeney’s is doing this. The New Yorker’s longer pieces accomplish this, if you cherry-pick. Lots of long-form journalism does this. Regardless, I believe that 1) we can make a conscious decision to design periodicals such that they fulfill this; 2) this isn’t a black-or-white thing, as some content can be jettisoned when it’s not appropriate to some sort of central mission, or there can be multiple different categorizations of a publication’s content; 3) there’s a positive correlation between broader critical respect of a publication and its ability to function like this.
To me, this is the most interesting topic, and I could probably write a lot more about it, but I’ll leave it be for right now.
Decontextualization and bundling
Content can be reorganized in two ways: separate pieces from one corpus can be put together in new ways, or articles can be collected from many different sources. So e.g. you’d have a playlist only of one artist’s songs, making a mix CD like that; or you’d have a playlist of that artist’s genre that happened to contain a few of the artist’s songs in addition to others’.
The staying power of content
Not like this, although that is still really important, but rather how timely and trendy the content is, and how useful and interesting it will be to read at some point down the line. There is content that I don’t care about tomorrow; there is content that I want to re-read in twenty years. One semi-related point: it’s easier to build a corpus out of content that has more staying power.
The necessity for an iPad app
A native iPad app is never necessary, but if there is one, the content had better be braindead easy to share outside its sandbox. See aforelinked.
I have no idea what I am doing and wrote this in twenty minutes in one take
I’m sure other people have better insights about this, as well as major points that I am surely missing, but I figure this post is easier to read than the tweets page that I posted at the top, there, so that has to be worth something.
How we meet and what we say.
Rands covered this, more or less, so this post is probably going to come off all “me-too” about the whole thing, but it’s important enough to bear repeating, at the very least. In the past four weeks, I went on some exhausting, masochistic marathon where I attended four conferences in three time zones:
- A barcamp-style one-day thing where I spoke about book design;
- A ridiculously intimate, single-track conference with forty attendees and a dozen speakers, which involved some of the kindest people I’ve ever met;
- Another ridiculously intimate, single-track conference with two hundred and fifty attendees - including, more or less, everybody that I respect and love on the internet - that focused on building relationships and making cool stuff;
- And a large conference in a hotel, with some inspirational and insightful talks among several tracks, where I spoke about dark patterns in user experience.
Each conference is a reflection of its organizers, of course, and the configuration of each conference speaks well to the kinds of relationships that were formed, and the kinds of conversations that were had. You can roughly guess how surface (or how deep) the conversation went at each of these, and having the opportunity to run that gamut has helped focus my opinions about the conferences that I want to attend in the future.
After one of them, on the flight home, I wrote in my notebook, buried in a list of priorities and resolutions: more hangouts with fewer people. I vastly prefer sitting down with somebody, one on one, than I do holding giant parties or social functions (despite all possible evidence to the contrary). Which is all to say, mapped onto this whole gradient of design circlejerkery that we’re putting forth here, that I would much rather hit up the smaller conferences, held in the middle of nowhere, with internet use frowned upon, than the larger ones.
Which isn’t to say that I refuse to speak at (or even attend) the larger ones, but rather that if you gave me a choice, I’d probably select shivering in a teepee with six other dudes over the comfy corporate-expensed hotel room; or (less drastically) the single track, self-selecting, relatively chill conference over the massive, downtown-hosing clusterfuck that has become so thoroughly overrun by the advertising and social media industries that the makers, those actually responsible for cool shit, avoided it near wholesale, with many of them not buying passes, and all of them huddling in bars on the fringe, in quiet places, waiting out the storm, and doing the best they can. For example. (Sometimes things don’t play out perfectly, of course, so let’s assume we’re trying to describe a more ideal state here.)
I imagine I’m not very special on this front: that i’m one data point in a broader trend, and people are seeking this kind of intimacy after what all has gone down in the past year. I reckon we’re much the better for it, though, and we’ll see this bear out in coming years. Here’s to more good things.