Responsive Web Design: Standard or Feature?
The folks at Paper Leaf have put together an overview of the things web agencies must consider when determining their approach to responsive web design.
It’s a tough question, and one that agencies need to ask themselves. Are responsively-designed websites a standard feature included in all website projects (which necessitates an increase in price), or are they an add-on that clients can choose to pursue or opt-out of?
“Facebook’s “frictionless” sharing doesn’t enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless.”
The quote above from The end of social totally sums up how I feel about Facebook’s new frictionless sharing: automatically posting read news, watched movies, or listened-to songs.
Facebook’s real value comes from Likes. When a friend shares something, it means they’ve put their seal of approval on it. “This is a good thing.” And, in todays world of information-overload and endless choices, recommendations from friends are increasingly how we decide which things to try.
Frictionless sharing does the exact opposite. Instead of only showing me the good stuff, it shows me everything and doesn’t help me filter the good from the bad. Instead of telling me “these are the things you should try”, frictionless sharing less me “these are all the things you could try.”
It’s not how people work offline, either. When you’re looking for a good movie to watch you don’t ask your friends to list of all the movies they’ve seen. You ask them to name their favourites. When a friend tells you they just tried that new Thai restaurant, you don’t blankly nod in acknowledgement; you ask them if they liked it.
There is utility in Facebook likes. That utility is lost with automatic sharing.
There’s been a lot written on this topic lately, but I this this paragraph is the most concise I’ve read:
Frictionless sharing isn’t better sharing; it’s the absence of sharing. There’s something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it’s just a feed in some social application that’s constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It’s just another form of spam.
Writing an Interface
A great checklist of things to consider when writing microcopy — buttons, help text, and success/error messages — for your website or application.
Microcopy is an often neglected aspect of user interface design. It’s tempting to provide generic button text (“Save”, “Cancel”) or form labels (“Blog title”, “Email”) and leave it at that.
But microcopy is a great opportunity to educate users on how a feature benefits them while also reinforcing their mental model of your application. And it adds that important human touch to your interface. For example:
- Instead of labeling a button “Save”, use “Save as draft”.
- Rather than provide useless help text for a form field (“This is your blog title”), explain the value of filling it out (“A catchy blog title grabs attention and gets you more visitors”).
- Use success/error messages to show your app’s personality (“Huzzah, your post has been published on your blog!”). Robotic messages like “Post saved successfully” are boring and uninspiring.
Polishing your microcopy adds clarity, and makes your users feel like they’re accomplishing something tangible rather than just using faceless software.
Bruce is an award winning animation that explores how advances in open-source synthetic biology allow a young man to grow his very own action hero from a lump of minced meat.
Just awesome. You can read more about this project and see other spectacular animation work in the Animade portfolio.
Is there glory in startups?
We’re in the middle of a second interweb bubble, where young, green developers are being pie-piped into working insane hours, sleeping under their desks, and living off Ramen noodles. This shitty, unsustainable lifestyle is glorified by much of the VC-funded startup scene. It’s viewed as a badge of honor.
Amy Hoy just posted a great article, Fuck Glory – Startups are One Long Con, where she condemns this type of thinking and those who perpetuate it, and exposes it for what it truly is. Here are a few gems from the highly-quotable piece:
The more kids who buy into the crazy dream, the more racehorses the venture capitalists can bet on, the more little soldiers the VCs can set on the board. The harder those kids work, the more theoretical chances the VC has that of one of his many investments making it big.
Every fucking time you see somebody using glory to hagiographize young men & women who are doing something clearly stupid, you must ask: What is this raft of shit, and why are they trying to get me to paddle it?
… those who sell glory, who sell religion, who sell noble wars, will not be in the trenches with you.
Sobering words. It’s full of great quotes and strong languages, so go read it.
Features & Physics Envy
Customers won’t value all the development you do on a project. Some necessary tasks such back-ups, re-factoring, optimisation, improving infrastructure offer little immediate reward. This doesn’t mean you can ignore those issues. The trick is to plan your roadmap so there’s never long periods where customers feel the application has been abandoned.
Scheduling & releasing features is definitely an art. We’ve been trying hard to avoid the scenario described above at FotoJournal. Over the last few months we’ve made a number of significant backend improvements (like performance boosts) but haven’t made quite as many frontend, customer-facing improvements. It’s easy to forget that, even though you’re working your ass of behind the scenes, your company can sometimes appear dormant from the customer’s perspective.
The Knife Maker is a captivating short film about self-taught knife maker Joel Bukiewicz, of Cut Brooklyn . This is the second video in a series produced by Made by Hand which “celebrates the people who make things by hand — sustainably, locally, and with a love for their craft.” Be sure to check out their first video, The Distiller, which profiles Breuckelen Distilling Company, the first gin distiller in Brooklyn since prohibition.
Google Reader redesign: a step in the right direction
The former project manager for Google Reader (Brian Shih) posted a harsh critique of the recent design changes to the Google Reader web interface. Judging by the comments and other posts, it seems many people agree with him. But (as often happens on the internet) people are getting overly upset about the negatives and failing to see the improvements the new design offers.
Brian complains that too much of the page’s real estate is dedicated to non-primary functionality, like search. But I welcome Google’s new approach. This interface has room to breathe, something their products typically lack. Interface design isn’t about how densely you’re able to pack controls into a screen. Grouping relating things and distancing them from unrelated things is how you create interfaces that don’t need to be learned — they’re simply used.
A good example of this is the new, brightly coloured “Subscribe” button for adding a feed to your list. It’s very prominent, even though adding a new feed is a relatively infrequent task. This disproportionate prominence is a good thing. It means that on the rare occasion I do add a new feed, doing so is easy. I don’t need to learn a new task and then make a mental note to remember how I did it for next time. This is much better than having to hastily scan a tightly packed screen for a tiny (and poorly labeled) “Manage Subscriptions” link, which how the previous design worked. Don’t make me think!
Aside from some new lipstick and some added/removed controls, I think the new layout is pretty similar to the previous layout. The dimensions are almost identical, so I’m not sure why people are complaining about how little screen area is dedicated to the reading area — hasn’t the reading area always been approximately this size?
Web interfaces are so 2009
Most surprising of all is that people actually use the web interface for Reader. Thanks to third-party apps like Reeder (and previously NetNewsWire), I can read all my feeds, beautifully formatted, without having to login to a silly website.
What do you think, is the new design an improvement or a step backwards?
If you’ve started a small business, and it seems like an uphill battle to generate sales, could it be that you’re providing something hardly anyone wants? If that’s the case, try not to see it as a personal failure. It happens often. It’s all part of the entrepreneurial calibration process. You’ll eventually figure out that sales matter, and it’s easier to generate sales by cooperatively giving people what they want as opposed to trying to convince them to want what you’ve decided to give.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in mud. After a while, you realize the pig is enjoying it.
