nickd

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.

How I do.

Spurred by Walter Mossberg’s code of ethics and certain events of late, I figured I would talk a little about the principles that I hold online. None of this is new, but I’ve never bothered to make any of it explicit. This is what works for me; other stuff may work for you, so you shouldn’t take it as preaching.

Don’t write about any products that I don’t already use. Easy enough. With a few extremely rare exceptions, I can’t force myself to use things that aren’t already appealing, and I won’t write about theoretical interfaces. This industry changes so much that speculative demonstrations matter worth very little, so I will only discuss shipped, usable, and useful products. This also means I won’t take free products, because in any such situation, I would just pay for the product anyway. (I sign up for beta tests if and only if I’ve already purchased an earlier version of the product, or if I plan to purchase the product once it publicly launches.)

Don’t write about any products that lack a clear, non-advertising-focused monetization strategy. Open source products, one-off hacks posted as a community service, nonprofits, and side projects don’t apply here, because there is already no expectation that the creators will make money off them. But if you’re going to found a startup and you have no clear way to monetize, forget it. I refuse to support any products that lack the courage to make money, I refuse to post about anybody who is too squeamish around the idea of making money, and I refuse to support (or work for) services that believe they have to fall back on advertising as a crutch for charging people.

No more than five public, non-@ tweets per day. This includes retweets. I maintain a personal account with a (much) higher follow cost, but the public one should remain unintrusive and easy to read. I chose five as an arbitrary number a couple of years back, and I’ve rarely hurt for it.

Don’t post any articles that I haven’t read the whole way through. No exceptions. Skimming is not the same as reading. I won’t support anything that I haven’t put the effort in to understand. I owe the article’s author – and anybody who reads my own blatherings – the time and effort to provide my full attention. This is sort of like the first rule above, but it may explain why I tend to post articles a few hours after everybody else.

Only follow real people on social networks. No couples sharing a login, no groups of people, no food trucks, no conceptual 140-character art pieces, and especially no companies. Two sort-of-exceptions on Twitter at the moment: I follow a design agency because I’m friends with the account’s maintainer (and she doesn’t ever post to her personal account), and I follow an account organizing a car share for an upcoming conference. (I do read several companies on RSS, but RSS hardly qualifies as a two-way communication medium in the same way as Twitter or Tumblr does.)

Market by word of mouth whenever possible. If people aren’t compelled to spread the word about the stuff that I do, then I’m not working hard enough, and I’m not making awesome enough things.

Don’t waste money. Be clear about profits and expenses. I don’t believe in buying things that I can’t clearly justify. For example, I outlined every single expense in my book’s budget and posted it online for people to inspect (and call out accordingly, if they thought they smelled any bullshit). This means that when I charge you money for something, you generally know where the profits are going to go. Not enough people – including the makers in our field – talk about the money that they earn, and what they do with it.

Be clear about an un-launched product’s timeline after its announcement. 99% of the time, it’s not going to ship “whenever.” Or “soon.” Be honest about how it’s going, what’s working, what isn’t working, and what is holding up the process.

Don’t flame anybody without a damn good reason for it. Nobody likes a hater, and constructive comments are almost always more valuable.

Use the Oxford comma. It’s just common sense for removing ambiguity from a sentence. I can’t believe that this is even an issue.

I reserve the right to change, bend, or break any of these. Lighten up. They’re guidelines, not laws. If some major event happens, for example, I’m probably going to break the five tweet rule. But you do get to hold me to this post if I do something that’s obviously heinous, and I don’t follow it up with a solid justification. (And for the record, I could have just as easily not written this post, and you wouldn’t know whether or not I was breaking something.)

Charge money for your work. Don’t be a jerk to people. Repeat.

Two things happened this morning that are worth further comment.

First, The AV Club’s interview of Dan Sinker, AKA @MayorEmanuel, where, buried a little ways down the page:

Because [Chicago-founded Groupon and Threadless] are companies that aren’t founded on California principles … which I will define as, “Hey man, we’ll make something really cool, and we’ll eventually make money from it.” Instead, [they’re based on] very Chicago roots, which is, “Let’s sell something people can buy, and let’s do it really well.” There’s actually a business plan in effect. Whether it proves to be a correct business plan or not is one thing, but it’s much less touchy-feely-and-eventually-we’ll-find-our-way than what you see out in California.

Exactly. Make something cool, charge people for it, take their money, keep making cool stuff. Sadly, an awful lot of people don’t practice it.

Second, the Ethan Marcotte-led Boston Globe redesign launched, which – shock! horror! – charges money for its content, and gives you a great experience in return. This is more or less the same thing that iA wrote about a few months back. Now, maybe this won’t work – I don’t think people have found a magic bullet for journalism quite yet – but kudos to the Globe for trying. I’ve wanted to pay for quality journalism for a while – and I don’t think I’m alone in demanding that it be coupled with a good reading experience.

I made a book. I charged people money for it. People bought it, and I made a profit from it. It took a lot of work, but I was rewarded accordingly. This, in turn, encouraged me to keep making more awesome stuff. It’s a tried and tested way of feeding myself – hustle, build, profit, repeat – and I’m happy to see others doing the same, in whatever other small ways. It sure beats the alternative.

Writing on writing, and what’s next.

I’ve spent some time here talking about the promise that I find in well-made books, but I haven’t talked very much about writing. Books are only as valuable as the writing that they contain, after all. Excellent design won’t save crappy text, but excellent design can help good text. And most books are going to contain a lot of text. A lot of text means a lot of writing. Good writing only comes after writing a lot of (usually) crappy stuff, like exercising weak muscles. So, enough good writing to fill an entire book is kind of a tall order – something that may not be apparent until you actually go and try to do the thing.

The internet – and blogs in particular – are good at encouraging and proliferating short-form writing. But I’m increasingly curious about how to create and perpetuate long-form writing, because while it appears that readers continue to hunger for it, writers seem less willing to write it.

It may be a question of effort; it is, after all, slightly easier to write and edit a thoughtful 140 characters than it is to write a blog post, and blog posts are easier than longer feature articles, and articles are easier than books. The effort increases (I’d argue exponentially) with the size of the output, the number of moving parts involved.

But it may also be part of the nature of the internet. Tons of people have criticized the internet for having a dumbing effect, where discourse drops in quality. I don’t agree with that; it takes a dim view on our cognitive faculties.

Still, I wonder about the logistics. The internet allows us to generate and work through ideas much faster. Have a question about something? Post it to Twitter – it’ll be answered. Want to start a really interesting conversation? Write a blog post about something that you’re passionate about. If you have the right audience, people listen to you and converse with you, and your writing works to refine your opinions and clarify alternate perspectives much faster. Which is all fantastic for short-form content, but where does that leave longer analysis?

There are sites, like Longform.org and Give Me Something to Read, that collect long writing. And a ton of it is great, but most of it is of a journalistic or political nature. I like reading it, but I’m a designer, and I want to read stuff about design, too. The best long-form articles about design are usually skills-based. They tell us about a specific technique, or they encourage us about process or logistics. Where’s the writing about why we do what we do? And, sort of related, circling the point: how can we encourage people to focus more deeply on such topics?

I’m reminded of a comment that I frequently see on Twitter, something to the effect of programmers channel their beliefs by making programs. Angry at something? Build a program to protest it. A tool doesn’t exist that does what you want? Scratch the itch. It’s constructive, useful, and it perfectly fits the web’s ethics.

What stops us from doing that as designers? Lately, there hasn’t been much long-form writing about the ethics and ideas that surround our profession. Why do we so frequently resort to link bait invective that tries to tear other designers and disciplines down? I think it’s because we lack a place for studied, considered writing that tackles the biggest issues informing our work. And I’m trying to create it – but I can’t do it without you.

I’m working on a big project that concerns thoughtful writing and considered research about design topics. I’m pretty far along in the process of making this, and I think it’s going to be great, but it concerns a scene that’s way larger than just me. The end result will focus on other people who demand better out of what we say, what we do, and how we think through problems.

And so I’m looking for folks who work in our industry, make cool things, love to write, and care a lot about the circumstances that affect them. It won’t be a huge commitment – probably no more than ten hours a week, for the next couple of months – so you can do it in addition to your day job, and it will have a definite endpoint. So if you’re intrigued, and you’d like to hear further, I’d love it if you would send me an email (nickd at nickd dot org) or contact me on Twitter.

Comprehensive.

Twenty books in the stack, which is unprecedented and more than a little daunting - four almost done, one re-reading, two fiction, one a reference text, two completed by friends, one telling me nothing I don’t already know, and Explorations in Typography, which resets the same passage over and over and over, changing typefaces, indents, exdents, weights, sizes, overall layout, little bits of flair. The text hovers between 7 and 8 pt, and the paper is 9.25”x12”, which makes the page:text proportion completely suited to print and heinously suited to interactive, but that’s okay because the layout tweaks are afforded tremendous freedom, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of mental effort to say “okay, this is kind of the same mental process that I work through every time I prototype, wireframe, nudge, etc.” Which all sort of takes me back to when I was 18 years old and redesigning my personal site and thinking really hard about whether I should bold the word “about” in an otherwise undifferentiated list of links.

And this reminds me a little of the 892 ways, which made me super enamored (for, like, twenty minutes) with the whole idea of programmatically explaining all sorts of permutations of a specific layout, which I’m imagining only works very well for very simple layouts, with very simple constraints, so that the permutations don’t scientific notation up the joint. But that’s really interesting, right? I think there’s a (somewhat romantic?) notion of applying math to something as squishy and emotional and coming-from-the-art-world-but-only-sort-of field as design, and to do it so neatly and completely is doubly so. Bosshard on steroids. He might approve.

I spent the evening thinking about all that, and drinking Lion’s Pride, and winnowing down the stack so it hits the teens by the weekend.

Garbage text.

I went to a party at a friend’s apartment last night. He showed me a book he had recently purchased, a best-selling novel. There is no way I can be charitable about this: it looked like crap. The paper stock was flimsy, rough newsprint. The leading and letterspacing were far too tight, presumably to fit more content on fewer pages. And the margins - what margins?

The novel might have been entertaining, but I shuddered at the idea of enduring over seven hundred pages of that particular design. The whole thing appears to have been produced without much regard for the way that people comfortably read. So even though the book’s designer may know typographic best practices, the cost of paper kept them from being implemented.

This book, with text that can be translated to other contexts without losing its intrinsic value, is a perfect candidate for ebook reading. And it’s not alone: thousands of other books, fiction and non-, work in the same way. This is the precise reason why ebooks are selling so well. Even the Kindle’s typographic issues are forgivable here, as any electronic platform would be a massive improvement on the book I saw last night. It felt like a waste of paper, a renunciation of possibility.

I had 20/12 vision for most of my life, but it degraded steadily when reading went from obligation to habit to obsession. I’d like to think that I have quite a lot more life left in me - and so there’s a lot more text to read. It’s hyperbolic to cast this as a matter of health, some warped kind of lifestyle illness for the hyper-literate, but it hits close to home all the same. In a world where the information we consume - both what and how much of it - increasingly defines our personality and our relationship to others, it becomes even more vital.

The world is demanding better design in piecemeal ways. Complete design novices now gush over how pretty a site or book or cell phone or grocery packaging looks - something that would be unheard of a decade ago. This is partly a matter of identifying with specific brands (and their attendant design aesthetics) in order to signify personality traits, but it’s also a matter of sheer practicality: legible text, typeset better, is easier to communicate. We should demand this of everything that we read.

Distance.

I am working on something new. I’d figure that’d be obvious by now but it probably is worth saying here. Everybody asks me what, of course, I’m working on, but I don’t feel okay telling very many people right now, because it is unfinished work, and I don’t like showing unfinished work, or even discussing unfinished terms of relatively finished work, which is sort of what this is; and so when I do tell people, if they don’t live in Chicago, and so I can’t take them out for coffee and tell them everything, I handwrite them a letter. I sit down and stick a pen on a piece of paper and I move my hand such that letters come out. Then I put the letter in an envelope, and I put the envelope in a box, and due to technology and some sort of complicated infrastructure the letter ends up in an entirely different box that is owned by the person whom I wish to tell. And then, of course, they are told.

So far, I have told three people.

I am gratified and humbled that so many people are interested in what I am working on, but I am not planning to tell very many more people before I am done with the thing. There will be fingers left on two hands, when counting the number of people that I will tell between now and when I am done with the thing, which deadline I am predicting as “some time in the future.” Not now. I love you, really, but I will not tell you now. In the interim, blog posts here will have to suffice.

Which doesn’t, of course, prevent people from asking me. Constantly. What I am working on. Which, due to said unfinished work thing, makes me really super uncomfortable. And so I have adopted a routine where I usually respond to this with “Doomsday device…” and trail off and stare into the middle distance until they stop asking me any questions. Now that you know that I do this, I cannot stress this enough: do not become one of these people. But you’re nice, and you’re my friend, right? So I can only assume that this wasn’t even something I needed to say.

Okay. Here. I compiled a list of the things I am not working on.

• The great american novel
• A doomsday device
• Cadence & Slang 2: Electric Boogaloo
• Cadence & Slang: Kindle Edition
• Cadence & Slang: Second Edition
• Freelance UX work
• A stealth group texting startup
• Any kind of startup (I mean, this is Chicago, after all)

Here is probably a useful thing. Imagine a big marble slab that consists of all the things I could be working on. Chisel away all of the stuff I am not doing, like some majestic David of productivity, his dong hanging out like he does not even give a crap. And what’s left is what I am working on. I am happy that you figured it out.