User interface is king

This morning, it was 68 degrees before 8 a.m. My son dressed in shorts for the first time this year. And he knew it was going to be the best recess of the season so far. But he had a paper for school (fifth grade) that he had hand-written, and needed to type up before handing it in this afternoon. He’d forgotten to do it last night, and if he didn’t have it done this morning, he was going to have to stay in at recess and type it up then.

So he scrambled to type it up this morning before we left the house. He didn’t finish. He was heading to Mimi’s house for breakfast, though, and might have some time there, so I suggested he email it to himself, then check his email at Mimi’s, and finish typing it there. Then he could email the final copy to himself (to pick up at school), and I told him to send it to me, too, just in case.

I dropped him off at Mimi’s, and  headed up to work. When I sat down at my desk, there was email from the little guy — with an attachment (in .rtf) of his paper. Some of the people I work with can’t even attach a document to an email, but he pulled it off. (And he did it all by himself, without help.)

Now, of course, part of the reason is that he’s a super genius. But the other part is that some folks have really figured out conceptual UI design. My little guy uses GMail, and GMail really makes it hard to go wrong. It’s got a top-down format, which makes you go step by step. No horizontal toolbars, no bevy of options, just a straightforward process, so easy, a ten-year-old can grok it. Only eight things to think about. To, CC, BCC, subject, formatting, spelling, attach a file, event invitation, and then you’re off. (OK, event invitation? Meh.)

Compare that to about a dozen or so (depending on your preferences) in Mail.app (chat? If I want to chat with someone, I’ll go to iChat, thanks) and OWA (Outlook Web Access) — and do note that several of the OWA options are icons, so you have no idea what they mean…

I have a phone on my desk. It has 38 buttons on it. I have only ever used 12 of them. I suppose if I were some fancy phone-nerd, I’d use the 38 buttons, but someone like me doesn’t need 38 buttons. I need 12. I also need a smaller phone.

Watch your words

SXSW Interactive continues in Texas, and amid the announcements of party attendance, hangovers, and meetups, some insightful stuff does bubble to the top. Tiff Fehr, a smart and talented Digital Web Magazine staffer, posted about her experiences on day three of the conference. The final point she makes is an excellent one for anyone in the public eye, whether a writer, a software developer, or even a curmudgeon — you are your brand. Remember this when you post to social networks.

People who are interested in your work will look at your blog, sure. But they’ll also look at your Flickr pictures, your Facebook comments, your Twitter tweets. All those together build onto any brand that you intentionally try to develop for yourself. That can work really well for you, supplementing your corporate identity with a bit of humanity or humor or dynamism. But it can also torpedo the hard work you’ve done to establish a brand in the first place. Sure, you might look respectable on your blog, but when your Flickr feed is full of dog fights and you shoot off your foul mouth in your YouTube phonecam videos, you’re not doing your brand any favors. And by extension, you’re not helping your business, whether you work for yourself or someone else.

When social networks die…

I found myself saying to a colleague this morning, “Orkut has gone the way of Friendster.” We were mulling over the reasons why certain social networks last, while others go the way of the summer fling.

I’ll admit it, I join every social network I see, more or less. If there’s anything particularly intriguing about a site, I’ll throw my hat into the ring. And I’ve found that the networks that I continue to use are the ones that offer me something other than social networking as a primary draw. Why do I still use Flickr? Because no matter what computer I’m on, no matter where in the world I am, I can find my pictures. While I’m not a knitter, I have learned from Ravelry members that it’s the bees knees, not primarily because of the other people, but because it offers tools to knitters that they’ve not had before — at least not at this level. The fact that there are other people in the Ravelry world to share with is just the proverbial icing.

Having things in common isn’t enough to sustain a social networking relationship. Perhaps it is in the real world — you can sit down over coffee and talk about the finale of The Wire, or the silly Olympics logo. But asynchronous relationships based on two-dimensional interactions are transient. There’s not much to hold your interest, and plenty of other shiny things to distract you.

For a social network to be really meaningful, it has to first be in service to the individual member somehow. It has to draw the user to it for a reason other than connecting with other people. Interest in Facebook (or is it facebook?) is waning, but it hasn’t tanked as quickly as Friendster (or mySpace) because someone is always sending you a new app, or a Zombie Bite, or an invitation to a game of Scrabble. But I sense even that will lose its appeal soon enough.

So, what explains the popularity and sustained success of LinkedIn? I’m still not sure how it fits into the paradigm. LinkedIn is different things for different people. For me, it’s a place to keep a skeleton copy of my c.v., and a place to keep track of people I am not regularly in touch with — so if someone’s email address changes, I’ll still be able to find her. For recruiters, it has very little to do with the social networking, and a lot about the résumé. Perhaps that’s the answer, then — it’s the Flickr of résumés. It’s a place for me to maintain a pointer to me, in case anyone’s looking for me. My relationships with others on LinkedIn are less important to me than my own details…but it sure is fun to find old friends from high school, and see where they ended up.

I guess the lesson learned here is, social networking for the sake of it, simply to exploit similarities in relationships, will always be short-lived. Anticipation, then excitement, then early adoption, then critical mass, then waning. It’s the relationships based on more than just proximity (even virtual proximity) that really seem to last.

It’s all about the user, dear.

I find it interesting how web publishing so clearly mirrors print publishing. Perhaps not the advertising model — that’s still in flux in both camps — but the user model. Newspaper editors are concerned with two types of stories: the ones that the readers want to read, and the ones that the readers need to read.

Then I think about my local newspaper. There’s the police log, the fire log, the public notices, the school lunch menus — all the stuff I want, available when I want to find it. I already know it’s there. It’s referenced in the page index of the paper, so I know right where to flip. It’s always in the same font, the same size, easily recognizable. It’s easy for the user, who anticipates its existence, to locate it when she wants to.

But then there’s the stuff we need to know, but don’t know to look for. That’s the stuff on the front page, the news well, the feature well — the stuff we don’t even know to ask about, because we don’t know what we don’t know. The editors have a handle on the content. They know what they’ve got, and we readers entrust them to judge the important items, and stick them where we can’t help but see them. We need to know, even if we didn’t ask (because we didn’t know to ask, so didn’t come awanting).

As web publishers, we show our users what we think they need to read — someone has to do the information architecture, make decisions about what goes where, and frame the user’s first impression. We also need to provide users with what they want to read; we are rightly inclined to include search functionality, site maps, and other navigational aids to expose content at the user’s behest.

What drives the need? For a local paper, perhaps good citizenship. For a trade pub, something important to our careers or our businesses. For a web project…whatever you, as the content wrangler, decide to be the most important. (If you make a glaringly wrong decision — well, either you didn’t have enough information, or you’re in the wrong line of work.)

Experience in conventional publishing is a boon for anyone who’s a web developer, because although the media is somewhat different, the users are the same, and they’re looking for the same stuff. As a consumer, I don’t care if I’m reading the school committee meeting minutes on a screen or on a page. I’m the same person, looking for the same information.

As web developers, it’s our job to make sure our users can get what they need as easily and intuitively as possible. User interfaces should be developed by people who know how to develop user interfaces (e.g. editors and art directors), not database developers who have no such experience. But too often, the UI follows the backend. (Here’s a fun real-world example. Well, fun, as in, horrifying.) A clock asymptotically approaches useless if you can’t figure out how to set it — I can more easily look at my watch than dig the manual out of the glove box and profess some mysterious incantation over the trip odometer — something that I’ll not remember six months later when I need to reset the clock. Make it easy, or I’m not going to be able to get what I want or what I need.

People forget. We’re busy. And I feel rather disrespected when something that could have been made so obvious is not. As a web developer, I’m in the service of my users. It’s my job to give them what they need, to give them what they want, and facilitate their getting it. I feel pretty maternal towards my users. I wish more content owners did.

The Cool Table

What do Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; manners expert Letitia Baldrige; astronomer Carl Sagan; author Robin Cook, M.D.; Senator Patrick Moynihan; writer Molly Ivins; the late actor Tony Randall; novelist Erica Jong; and NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg have in common?

Am I a Journalist?

There’s been a good bit of discussion these days regarding journalism — what is it, who’s doing it, are bloggers ‘journalists’ — and it’s got me thinking. OK, honestly, my first thought was, “It’s a semantic discussion, and that’s stupid.” And that’s true. Call yourself what you want, people will nitpick over syntax, and I will sit over here and drink my coffee. And I’ll still believe that is the answer to the question of whether or not bloggers are journalists.

But I don’t think that’s the real question. I think the real question is, “Is the writing/reporting done by bloggers as important/useful/respectable/etc. as that of reporters and editors working in the conventional news business?” The answer to this is much more complex. One point to get out of the way right off is that the conventional news business has sunk to a profoundly low level in many places. If a blogger wants to associate herself with what mainstream media has become, then good for her. But let’s consider also that there is, in fact, some really good journalism going on in some places. That there are reporters, editors, and photographers who really do want to write well for the communities they serve. That there really are journalists out there who aren’t manipulated by advertisers, who work very hard to avoid bias, who are trustworthy, and as such, have good connections. There are journalists who are willing to spend time at libraries, in archives, in people’s offices, and out on the street to really get news — and not just news, but news and context. Then we pair these journalists up with editors and fact-checkers, and there we have some serious media. Excellent reportage, good storytelling, clean grammar. This is sort of the pinnacle of journalism — what society seems to want journalists to be. (Certainly what I wish the media was today in greater measure.)

Some of these journalists blog. The fact that they blog doesn’t make them journalists, but journalists who blog. There may also be bloggers who do the sort of stuff I mention above, even though they don’t work in the mainstream media. I can’t think of any good examples right now, but I do leave open the possibility that such a person exists. (Feel free to comment with suggestions.) But we still haven’t touched on another important definition of a journalist, and that is, what is a journalist’s role in her community? Whether her community is Peoria, Illinois, or the reality-distortion field that is the blogosphere, she brings a certain value to that community by doing what she does, and has a certain obligation to the community that she serves. Some folks have articulated quite nicely what those roles and responsibilities are. In the introduction to their book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel list “some clear principles that journalists agree on — and that citizens have a right to expect.”

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.
2. Its first loyalty is to citizens.
3. Its essence is a discipline of verification.
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.

Do most bloggers do this? No. A vast number of self-proclaimed citizen journalists don’t, in fact, meet most of these precepts (especially 2, 3, and 8 — even TalkingPointsMemo doesn’t allow public comments on its feature articles as far as I can tell, only on its blog posts). Does that mean these bloggers aren’t journalists? Nope. A blogger can surely be a journalist. Some blog posts on some blogs are definitely good examples of solid journalism. But as I have told my son on occasion, “You’re not a bad boy, you’re a good boy who did a pretty rotten thing.” Or remember the old apothegm, “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.” You don’t have to go to J-school to be a journalist. You don’t even have to work for someone who pays you and reads your stuff and then publishes it. But you do have to ensure that your writing consistently adheres to journalistic principles (including, but not limited to, the Sigma Delta Chi code of ethics).

Journalism doesn’t sell, though. It’s not sexy. When done right, it requires an investment of time and thought on the part of the consumer, and lots of people simply don’t care to think anymore. Kind of like public schools — everyone knows they have value, but no one’s really willing to pay for them. Other stuff’s more important, right? Like a fancy iPhone. So I can read my blogs on the go. (No, I don’t really have an iPhone. But I have been known to read blogs on my mobile phone. It is 2007, after all.)

So, to finally answer my own question that I posed in the title of this post. Am I a journalist? Yeah. Yes, I think I am. I spent ten years working for newspapers and magazines in various editorial capacities — from ‘abstracter of press releases’ to ‘reporter’ to ‘fact-checker’ to ‘features editor’ to ‘editor’ (and a few titles in between). I understand the importance of journalistic ethics, and responsibility to readers. But my blog isn’t a place where I try to practice journalism. I rant and rave about my wacky opinions. Sure, there might be a fact or two in there, but really, I’m just shilling for my perspective on the mortal coil. And journalism that ain’t. Even when it’s done by a journalist.

Vacation

It’s been quite a while since we’ve had a proper vacation — a few years, in fact. And while our upcoming trip to Banff isn’t going to be a proper vacation (two days of traveling, two days of vacationing), it’s really going to be nice to get away for a little while. Leaving tomorrow morning, coming home Monday night. I haven’t even thought of packing yet. However, the video camera is all juiced up and ready to go. With any luck, there’ll be a great deal of relaxing, seeing as T-Mobile plans to charge me forty-nine cents a minute for a phone call, and fifteen cents a text message, and some ridiculous per-kb usage charge for data. Off to find me a paperback.

Better isn’t always better.

“Welcome to the Delicious Generation. Where guys who can’t get a date get drunk and argue about frameworks.”

I know there’s a digital divide, and of course, I’m squarely on the digital side of it. One might say that, since I’m a programmer, and someone who loves gadgets, and someone who loves logic puzzles, and someone who has trouble thinking *inside* the box, I’m teetering near the far edge.

That makes me kind of uncomfortable.

I feel like I, and lots of other folks on this side, are involved in a strange anthropological experiment or something. “Let’s take the hu-mans, and we’ll put some of them in front of screens, and create idols, make shiny things, things that beep at them and make them feel important, and then let them tell everyone else how important they and their likes are. Then they’ll get so much validation from these computers and these devices, they won’t NEED to interact with people, with the land, with social issues. They won’t care all that much about the emotional health of their families — they’ll just provide them with beeping gadgets, so their spouses and children can be validated by beeps, too. They won’t see beauty unless it’s displayed in pixels.”

The far-reaches of the digital divide are something I used to strive for. I needed the coolest, fastest, newest thingie! Only losers don’t have it! But it’s a lonely Siberia out here. Spend the day in front of your computer, and then go to a school committee meeting. Serve on a commission where most of the people only check their email once a day. Talk to your carpenter about biscuits and glue. Imagine being those people. I don’t think I was ever one of them…I was geeking out on Apple ][s in high school, marveling at how I could make Eliza say dirty words.

These days, I’m as likely to have my face in the bobbin race of an antique sewing machine as I am to be in front of a computer — during non-work time, that is. The action of the ruffler foot. The smell of the old steel. The regular oiling. The absolute MECHANICALNESS of the whole thing. Not only is it not digital — there isn’t even any PLASTIC! And the beauty is not in the preservation of the machine. It’s not about what the machine will be like in 50 years. It’s about now. What can I do with it now? What can I make? What can I learn about fundamental things such as physics, and fabric, and what it was like to be a mother 75 years ago, making a quilt for her son so he’s warm at night…because she HAD to. Because if she didn’t, her child would be cold. The practicality of darning a worn sock (rather than throwing it away and getting a new one). Who CARES if it’s a sock that now has a seam in it? Is it still a sock? Does it serve the functions of a sock with no detriment? Then use the damned sock! Don’t throw it away!

*sigh* I don’t know. Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’m jaded. Or maybe I’ve just been sold a bill of goods one too many times, made to believe that my life really WILL be better with this one last thing. But grabbing for the squeaky-clean, always new, top-of-the-line, tweaked-to-perfection-and-beyond thing is not, in my opinion, something to be proud of. Sometimes, when I do it, I actually feel sort of pathological. There must be something in the DSM-IV about it. It’s not OCD. It’s a well-bouyed belief that better is always better. And that just ain’t so. Sometimes, ‘better’ makes things worse. Go darn a sock. Go drive a nail. Go dump your inbox, and only go near it once a day. Maybe you’ll see what I mean.

Browser testing

Firefox
Camino
IE5 Mac
IE6 Win
IE7 Win
Opera
Lynx

And now

Safari XP
Safari Vista

Test-O-Rama!

“Oh sure, RoR will scale…”

From an interview on Radical Behavior:

“By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right
now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues -
issues that any growing site eventually contends with – far sooner
than I think we would on another framework.

The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling
Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem
is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel
cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this
point in time there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one
database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out
of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases,
neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it’s not just
cost, it’s time, and time is that much more precious when people can[’t]
reach your site.

None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing
for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that
makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely
punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of
traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that
Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move
the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.

It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s
mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people
are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right
now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application
and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby
will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big
Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of
those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.”

Jogging at gunpoint…

(Post title with apologies to Robin.)

When I was a kid, my mother would sometimes razz me when I was being naggy or insistent, saying, “You want what you want when you want it!” And I would think, “Well, duh. Doesn’t everyone?”

In reading an article on 37Signals’ blog (warning, contains NSFW language, depending on where you W), I thought, you know, people these days are missing the point. (And it’s going to take me a minute to get to the point…stick with me.) Yes, I want 24/7 internet access. I have a data plan on my phone, I have a laptop, I have FIOS and a wireless network at home. I’ve got ubiquitous access.

But I don’t want to be on line all the time. I just want what I want when I want it.

So many people are commenting on this thread (comments are closed, so I guess I have to post myself to get it off my chest) about how it’s “hard” to disconnect. Well, let me introduce you to something.

Meet your friend the POWER BUTTON. Use it. Just because you CAN be connected all the time doesn’t mean you HAVE to be. Turn it off. Step away from the computer. Don’t you have the power to do that?

It makes me believe that there’s nothing more compelling in your life than your computer. If that’s true, I really feel sorry for you. Today, I walked across my office, away from the computer (sound off, couldn’t see the screen), and I sat in my comfy chair with my feet up, and I did some hand-quilting on a quilt square I’ve been working on. I spent about a half hour doing it. No phone, no internet, no nothing. I listened to the sounds of the kids walking by outside, the cars driving by, and sat there inside my own head for a bit. Because there’s no need to be ON all the time.

Now, yes, the original post is really about your internet connection being on, not your computer, but like lots of early adopters, my internet connection is live most of the time that my computer is on. And the author’s point is that if your computer is on, it’s probably connected, and if it’s not connected, then take that time as down time.

No. No no no. Take down time when YOU WANT DOWN TIME. It’s your time. (Well, except when you’re working for da man, but let’s not quibble, here, you know what I mean.) The point is that I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it. If I want to work on a quilt square on my lunch hour, rather than reading Fark, I will. If I want to look up the status of a project when I’m on an airplane, I want to be able to do that, too. There’s no valor in sucking it up, in taking down time when you HAVE to (because you have no intertubes!). There’s no shame in wanting what you want when you want it. Sorry, Mom, there just isn’t.

(PS – Not to mention the fact that putting one’s data on a central server somewhere, and communicating with that server through non-secure connections is stupid when you’re working on anything but recipes…and of course when you use a ’service’ to store your contacts, your business plans, your yadda yadda yadda, there’s nothing stopping one of the folks who works there from having his way with your data *cough*AOL*cough*.)

Recognition

When you’re working on a web project, people are quick to point out what they hate about it, but less likely to tell you that it’s great. Today something nice happened — I and two colleagues got a recognition award from the CIO for a project we did last year. It was a pretty important project in some circles around the country, but for me it was great because I got a chance to do a few new things, work with amazing raw materials, and most importantly, work with some terrific people.

It was definitely one of my favorite projects ever, and only phase one has been completed — phase two should be careening forth very soon.

Projects, projects, projects…

I’m not a huge fan of doing multiple projects in parallel, but I guess that’s the way of the world. Right now, I’m banging out a few tools, including a project management interface (PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS) and a bibliography aggregator (PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, XHTML, CSS), a couple of humanities projects, one involving video of historical reenactments (PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, XML, XHTML, CSS [cataloging, storage, retrieval, archiving, and presentation]), and another involving the digitization and rich markup of hundreds of antiquated documents (XML, XSLT, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript).

The one I’m enjoying the most at this point is the bibliography aggregator. It may never see the light of day, but as a proof of concept, it is darned effective. It leverages uses the free and very cool API at ISBNdb, and draws some of its required bits of data (e.g. a ‘book’ item needs a title, author(s), date, publisher info, etc.) from the desktop app Endnote. You can either fill out the form manually with this information, or type in the ISBN of the book, and the fields (through the magic of XML, PHP’s simpleXML function, and a few convoluted regular expressions) are populated with the appropriate values. It’s all rather sexy! (Email if you want to see it in action — I don’t want to publish a development-server URL.)