I never used to like interview articles — I felt they lacked substance. Too much backstory, not enough useful information to help me do my job better. But over the past few years I’ve realised the error of my ways. It became clear that by getting to know the people who make the things we use every day, we keep being reminded that we’re defined by more than the jobs we do. And we find that we have more in common with people than we might think.

This week I read two great interviews with designers I’ve admired for a long time. The Great Discontent interviewed Trent Walton, and Industry Web Conference interviewed Josh Brewer. Both interviews are worth reading all the way through, but I want to mention something specific that stood out for me.

Once you become a parent you start looking at everything through that lens — from grocery shopping to restaurant menus to the work you decide to devote your life to. There’s no getting around it. Non-parents usually find it annoying, while fellow parents are drawn to each other and can’t help but discuss how the parenting lens affects every single decision they make every day.

So, my favourite parts of these two interviews were their reflections on parenting. Here’s Trent:

It’s insanity [at work] until 5pm and then I go back inside and it’s all hands on deck. I’m feeding the kids, changing diapers, reading books, and bathing them—I love it because there’s no time to answer email or think about anything work related. It’s a really great transition for me. What I would have thought I would see as a pain in the ass is the best part of my day and it helps me to shift gears.

And here’s Josh, saying something similar:

Keeping things in balance was (and is) a constant challenge and something that my wife and I work hard at. I tried to be home in time for dinner and reading to my daughter and tucking her into bed. Weekends were definitely reserved for family time. I was lucky enough to walk to and from work which gave me a little time to decompress.

It’s hard to explain how comforting it is to read those paragraphs. To realise that these extremely successful designers — people I look up to and learn from every day — generally don’t work 12 hours a day. They work hard, of course, but as any parent knows, 5:30pm - 7:30pm is chaos. And the people we look up to aren’t immune to that. They don’t have superpowers that allow them to fly through that time, and the ones I really admire don’t push those responsibilities to their partners or someone else. They show up, every day, and they pursue the challenges of being a parent with every bit of passion that they throw into their design work.

This is really obvious stuff, I know, but I also think (hope?) I’m not alone in the struggle to find a balance between pursuing my career goals and learning to become a good parent. So reading Trent and Josh’s stories gave me comfort that it is possible to excel at what you do without losing your soul to your work.

And that’s why I like interview articles.

Cap Watkins is switching from RSS to Twitter, and so far he is very happy:

Now that I’ve started using Twitter for feeds, I’m unlikely to ever go back. The ease of sharing, Favoriting, Retweeting, sending to Instapaper, etc. not only match, but at times surpass even Reeder in terms of ease and simplicity. One less app to deal with is a win, not to mention that the links are ordered exactly as I like them (and holy crap, Tweetbot iCloud sync. So good).

Cap goes over the pros and cons of his decision, but I think there’s one major con that he left out: Twitter is a river, RSS is a filing cabinet. Ok, I apologize for the mixed metaphor, but hear me out.

Twitter updates flow by you in a never-ending stream of links. This means that if you choose to follow RSS feeds in this way, all the separate article feeds flow into that one river, and there’s no stopping it. If you happen to be offline for a day or two, it’s extremely likely that you’ll miss an update from an infrequently-updated website you love.

With RSS, that problem doesn’t exist. Since article feeds are separate, there isn’t one giant river (you can choose to view “All feeds” in most readers, but that’s optional). So, I just open the filing cabinet whenever I want, and I can immediately see how many updates my favourite sites have received. I can decide to nuke the unread counts on a site with 50 new items. I can seek out the content I really want. I don’t have to worry that the river will keep flowing and I’ll miss the boat completely (ok, now I’ve really killed this metaphor).

So, although I agree with the pros Cap highlights in his post, and I’m glad he found a reading flow that works for him, I’m not ready to give up RSS. It’s still my favorite way to discover good content.

In A More Flexible Workflow Dennis Kardys describes an all-too-familiar design process problem in agencies:

In theory the design assembly line made us extremely efficient. Design documents were handed off like batons from one team member to the next as projects moved through stages. The reality however, is that projects would often get held up as clients mulled over wireframes or fought for consensus within their organization. […] In a nutshell, there was too much talking and too little testing.

Dennis goes on to describe how they’ve successfully changed their workflow to incorporate interactive prototypes and frequent customer feedback. These aren’t new ideas, of course, but it’s great to see it from an agency perspective, where these flexible workflows can be much harder to implement.

Sticking with the design process theme, Tuhin Kumar wrote a good post about matching the type of critique a project requires to the design phase that project is currently in. From Feedback & Fidelity in Design:

Momentum is one of the best things for any product design process. It helps you from straying around the wrong path, or losing your core vision, or trying to solve too many things in the first release. […] Asking the wrong questions at the wrong fidelity or giving the wrong feedback kills momentum like nothing else.

Tuhin defines some different phases of the design process, and recommends the right questions to ask during each. Both these articles give some great tips to improve your design workflow.

I’d like to thank Xero for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week.

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

About a year ago I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine called A Dad’s Plea To Developers Of iPad Apps For Children. It was generally well received, but some of the comments were inevitably judgemental about parents who let their kids use iPads.

With that as backdrop, I really enjoyed Gary Marshall’s post Don’t fear your kids’ tech tantrums. He starts by making this point:

Let’s start by separating the “lazy parent” argument from the “kids shouldn’t have devices” argument. You can be a good parent and let your kids play on the iPad, and you can be a bad parent with a house full of encyclopaedias.

Gary’s main point is that giving kids appropriate exposure to technology — as part of a wider mix of non-tech activities — is essential to help prepare them for the digitally-focused world they are growing up in:

These are all valuable skills, critical skills, and the older she gets and the more tech-saturated the world becomes the more important digital literacy will become. I want my daughter to be ready for that world, not to be afraid of it or to be manipulated by it.

So thank you, Gary. I feel a little bit better about those comments now.

I was going to write about the Google Reader shutdown but Brent Simmons beat me to the argument I was going to make. In Why I love RSS and You Do Too he sums up why we should all care about Google Reader’s demise:

Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you still use RSS. If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides. Lots of apps on the various app stores use RSS in at least some way. […] And those people you follow on Twitter who post interesting links? They often get those links from their RSS reader. One way or another, directly or indirectly, you use RSS. Without RSS all we’d have is pictures of cats and breakfast.

Killing Google Reader doesn’t kill RSS, for sure, but it’s such a big part of the ecosystem that we should be concerned about the health of the platform. From the perspective of a guy with a blog this is pretty depressing news. RSS subscribers are extremely difficult to grow, but they are, by far, the best kind of readers. I’ve written about this before, but to reiterate: they’re loyal, they read almost everything, and they share your stuff. It’s the best way to build an audience. Hunter Walk makes this point succinctly:

Google Reader impact also undercounted if you strictly look at # users bec many power-curators/sharers use it as a discovery system

— Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) March 14, 2013

But Scott Stein has perhaps the best TL;DR version of the whole debacle:

Google Reader is to Twitter as a well-labeled filing cabinet is to a bag of insane cats.

— Scott Stein (@jetscott) March 14, 2013

So, what now? For a bit of nostalgia, Buzzfeed has a great history of Google Reader. It’s a fascinating story, worth reading. And then, Om Malik has an interview with the original creator of Google Reader. Once you’re done grieving and ready to move on, Lifehacker has a very comprehensive post on the alternatives.

Frank Chimero has a great follow-up to Tino Arnall’s excellent post No to NoUI. In The Cloud is Heavy and Design Isn’t Invisible Frank explores what’s appropriate (and what’s not) about using “The Cloud” as a metaphor, and then he makes a great point about the Invisible Design trend:

Sometimes I wonder if the desire to obfuscate production and make the resulting design invisible or seamless to users diminishes their appreciation for the craft of building systems. I think there’s a strong likelihood that metaphors like “The Cloud” and sayings like “It Just Works™” reduce a user’s appreciation of the software/hardware they are using. “Magic” is a great word for selling product, but it also can cheapen all the sweat it takes to get there. If the seams have been covered, you can’t admire how things connect.

I completely agree with Frank on this. As I’ve mentioned before, I think our goal shouldn’t be NoUI (or YesUI or AlwaysUI or whatever we want to label the other extreme). Our goal should be appropriate visibility.

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed is a punch-in-the-gut piece by David Cain. Consider this paragraph:

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Feeling indignant that he would insinuate that you of all people have been indoctrinated by a consumerist culture? Before you close your laptop in disgust, hear the man out. Haters gonna make some good points sometimes…

Josh Emerson offers some words of advice that we should all take to heart:

But perhaps the most important thing I want to highlight here, is that the answer to most questions is it depends, and very often in the grey area between black and white. Try not to take extreme views on things, and perhaps see that there is always another level of complexity to be discovered in any decision you make.

We just came out of a season of arguing whether or not Flat Design is the answer to everything. We also heard proclamations that wireframes are dead, designers do in fact need to code, and Photoshop is on its last legs.

But you know what? Screw that. We have to remind ourselves that the vast majority of design is done by people who don’t have Twitter accounts and large public followings. Out there in the trenches they shouldn’t have to worry about what’s cool or what styles they’re allowed to like. They should only care about getting the job done, and using whatever tools they have at their disposal to do the right thing.

Doing the right thing is complex, and messy. Sometimes it has the luxury of involving a content-first approach with interactive prototypes, but other times it involves having to make static wireframes and designing before any content is available. It’s not ideal, but who are we to judge a designer based on what we perceive as the quality of their process? What do we know about the complexity of the project, the relationships they are trying to navigate, and the users they are designing for?

My advice is this. Yes, follow the design zeitgeist. Study the big ideas and explore the edges where the industry is being pushed forward. But don’t get caught up in whatever the cool viewpoint is about any methodology or style. Only you know what your project needs. So be confident, ignore the extreme viewpoints, and use whatever tool will be most effective to help you do the right thing.

In The Guardian Tom Meltzer asks, Are our household appliances getting too complicated? Despite violating Betteridge’s law of headlines he makes some good points:

“The innovation is obviously being driven by manufacturers’ desire to add value and to differentiate themselves,” says analyst Neil Mason, head of retail research at market research company Mintel. “But from a consumer’s point of view, what they want is convenience and simplicity. When you run into trouble is when you add all these extra functions and consumers just get perplexed as to how to actually use them.”

He cites some classic examples of technology-driven innovation — asking “What more can we do with this technology?” as opposed to “What goals do our customers want to accomplish with our product?”