I just received an email from Pinterest to let me know that one of my Facebook friends has joined the service. I found the email odd, because I specifically remember turning off all email notifications (since I don’t use the site any more). I clicked through to “change notification preferences”, and saw this:

Ah, I see. This is a new “feature” Pinterest added, so they decided to turn the email notification on by default. I immediately thought of Vibhu Norby’s words:

Private is an ethical default. Public is not.

That principle should also go for email notifications from any service. “Off” is an ethical default. “On” is not. I’m picking on Pinterest because it’s the most recent example, but this has become common practice on the web. The irony is that sending me email I didn’t explicitly ask for makes me less likely to engage with a site, not more.

Cole Peters believes the user experience community has relegated aesthetics to a second-class design citizen. From his essay Form Worship:

Despite my challenges with designs that score (theoretically) high on experience and low on beauty, it’s not hard to understand their genesis. UX inherently promises its clients an influx of users, and generally promises increases in conversions (and sales) by inference. The pursuit of aesthetics doesn’t promise to bring more customers through the door or more dollars into the business; in fact, it’s so subjective that it’s tough for it to promise anything at all. What place, then, should it have in today’s business-driven design industry?

Cole goes on to make a case for the importance of aesthetics in design, which I agree with. I do, however, want to add some thoughts about this statement:

We need to stop looking for promises in Design. Design should never be approached as a programmatic practice, like some machine that, given the right ingredients, is guaranteed to spit out a delicious loaf of success.

I love the sentiment, but from a practical perspective we don’t have the luxury not to make promises of success in design. As Brandon Schauer said:

There is no reason for a company to support a great experience unless it makes money. If there is no economic incentive, it either can’t exist (unsustainable) or it’s art.

This leads to my next point, which is that conversion/sales increases aren’t the only design promises we can make. Beautiful design can improve businesses in a variety of ways. Cennydd Bowles has a great piece related to this called Why aren’t we converting?. You should read the whole thing, but here he explains some of the other “promises” of design:

I do suggest seeing user-centred design as something wider than just a means of optimising a conversion rate. While there may not be a noticeable uplift in any specific metric, the raw material of design is frequently intangible: trust, loyalty, engagement, etc. These things are much harder to measure, but they still make themselves felt indirectly in other metrics: support costs, referral rates, customer retention, and so on.

So here’s the thing. UX people who don’t take aesthetics seriously are doing it wrong. As I’ve written before, a focus on good aesthetics helps a design to fit the brand promise and elicit appropriate emotional responses from users1. In fact, there is a strong argument to be made that aesthetics are becoming essential to the survival of any product. Since most products now have a baseline quality that is good enough, users come to expect products to be beautiful, not just functional.

The aesthetics problem in design exists not because UX precludes a focus on beauty. The problem is that not all UX people take the long and difficult road to convince clients and stakeholders of the very real business benefits of good aesthetics.

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1. See also In Defense of Eye Candy, which makes the case that attractive things are perceived to work better. ↩

Anil Dash discusses App.net in You Can’t Start the Revolution from the Country Club:

In today’s world, where the social web is mainstream, innovating on the core values of tools and technology while ignoring the value of inclusiveness is tantamount to building a gated community. Even with the promise that the less privileged might get a chance to show up later, you’re making a fundamentally unfair system.

I am genuinely confused. If you take this argument to its logical conclusion, is he saying that everything we make should be free so that it doesn’t exclude anyone? Isn’t that how we arrived at the current situation where advertisers call the shots on major social networks?

I didn’t back App.net because I hate Twitter and want to move somewhere else. I love Twitter, and I have no problem with anyone who uses it because I get to choose whose tweets I see. I backed App.net because I want to see what innovation comes out of it. To illustrate my point, in 1970 a NASA director attempted to make the case for space travel to a Nun who asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on space projects at a time when so many children are starving on Earth. From Why Explore Space?:

I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on Earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results.

I understand that comparing an app to space travel is silly, but if you read the whole letter you’ll understand the sentiment that prompted me to back App.net. I believe that a community of passionate developers can use the platform to develop ideas that not only solve existing problems with web publishing, but also meet some as-of-yet unknown web user needs.

For me, it’s not about excluding people, or sticking it to The Man. It’s about funding a playground for innovation1.

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1. Wow, did I really just use that tired phrase? Sorry. I actually do mean it, though. ↩

Alex Maughan adds his thoughts to the “fast web” discussion in The Slow Web and the Thievery of Fast Lifestyles:

We are philics of immediate gratification, ticket holders impatiently awaiting our entrance into the never-ending show of serial distractions. Far too many of us are phobic of the good stuff. The stuff that takes emotional maturity. The stuff that takes time, and doesn’t constantly pat you on the back for every small thing you do. The stuff you don’t find on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Dribble. The stuff that requires you to exist without constant, yet ultimately spurious, forms of reinforcement; without any distractions; without the need to bolster your perceived self-worth by harvesting as many Likes as you can for every little asinine thing we spit out onto the Web. We increasingly shy away from the stuff that requires a longer form of consideration to ripen.

The post ends with some guidelines that he’s setting for himself to fight this problem. It’s worth reading.

Just over a week ago Frank Chimero tweeted, “Time to close the computer.” He then deleted his entire tweet history and unfollowed everyone he used to follow. Today that tweet is gone as well, his avatar is a dog, and he follows 3 very different people and 1 bot (@Horse_ebooks, of course).

I don’t know if that story means anything, but Frank is a pretty famous designer, and all I’m saying is that something is going on. Everywhere I look I see people behaving like they just fell off a chair on the Axiom only to realize that staring at a screen all their waking hours isn’t as fantastic as they thought it was.

Maybe it is time to close the computer.

It’s not fashionable any more to have heroes. In fact, I’m scared to admit that I like anything, because I just never know if maybe, for some reason, we’re supposed to complain about that thing instead. Look at the response to App.net, for example. Much of it has been positive, but there is also an awful lot of snark and sarcasm out there — much of it from people I like and admire. So I’ve resisted the urge to confess that I backed the project, and that I like the Alpha product so far.

It’s become really hard to know what we’re allowed to like online.

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I don’t remember exactly when I started to read John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, but I do remember that it had an immediate and profound effect on my view of online publishing. His efficiency with words gave me an appreciation for what web writing could be, and I started to dissect every post to try to learn as much as I could. Gruber and Merlin Mann did a talk about blogging at SXSW 2009 where they discussed the idea of Obsession times Voice:

Topic times voice. Or, if you’re a little bit more of a maverick, obsession times voice. So what does that mean? I think all of the best nonfiction that has ever been made comes from the result of someone who can’t stop thinking about a certain topic — a very specific aspect of a certain topic in some cases. And second, they got really good at figuring out what they had to say about it.

That talk — along with Gruber’s site — got me thinking: I wonder if I could do something like that? I have so many Obsessions. Could I maybe find a hidden Voice somewhere in those obsessions? It’s after hearing that talk that I decided to start taking this site more seriously. And even though Daring Fireball probably gets the equivalent of my monthly traffic in about an hour, this has still been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It has opened so many doors and enabled me to meet some wonderful people.

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Why is it that we reach for the comforts of collective cynicism whenever someone who is not in our inner circle of coolness tries to do something new or different? In the case of App.net, someone just raised more than $500,000 from end users to build a product that’s trying to compete with Twitter. Why can’t we just, for a few moments, look past everything that might be wrong with the idea, and appreciate what an enormous accomplishment that is?

You don’t have to like Dalton Caldwell or App.net. You don’t even have to be quiet about not liking them. Really — it’s ok to not like things. But don’t be a dick about it.

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Gruber linked to me once on Daring Fireball. Hey, so what if I printed out his post and framed it? I still remember opening my RSS reader on the morning of Thanksgiving 2011, and falling out of bed when I saw my name on Daring Fireball. I was floating on air for weeks. It wasn’t about the traffic — it was Thanksgiving so there was pretty much no one online. The reason I was so happy is that John Gruber — someone I decided I want to impress with my writing — noticed something I wrote, and put it on his site. Since I really want to make this thing work long term, that was the biggest encouragement I could have received.

I took the opportunity to write to John to thank him not just for the link, but for the impact he has on my writing. Here’s one part of what I said:

I appreciate and learn so much from your approach to writing — you’re authentic and to the point, which is in such contrast to much of the web. Thank you for showing so many of us aspiring writers that we don’t have to sell our souls to have an audience.

He emailed back:

Great note. Thanks!

—J.G.

The response couldn’t have been more Gruber. Even in a short email, a regular dash just isn’t good enough. It’s em dashes all the way for the guy whose Obsession times Voice is about the quest for perfection in everything we do.

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I know it’s not fashionable any more to have heroes. But this week App.net got funded, and Daring Fireball turned 10 years old. So roll your eyes if you must, but I’m just going to say it.

I backed App.net, and John Gruber is one of my heroes.

A couple of articles caught my eye today because they tie in well with my Intuition vs. Science in design post from yesterday. In Design and uncertainty Ellen Beldner writes about an essential characteristic for every designer: acknowledging that your assumptions will be wrong more often than not. She also makes a great case for usability testing:

The problems come when you don’t admit, as a designer or product person, that intuitions based on your mom or yourself may or may not extend to what most other people actually do. So a designer who seems like a hotshot Howard Roark out of college may be great for that one particular project. But when you ask him or her to work on a design for a domain that they don’t “intuitively” understand (since they don’t have years of experience being within that particular community) they’ll flail if they don’t know how to turn to research and data to inform their opinions.

I also love John Lilly’s advice to design like you’re right; listen like you’re wrong:

You should always design the product you think/believe/know is what people want — there’s a genius in that activity that no instrumentation, no data report, no analysis will ever replace. But at the same time you should be relentless in looking at the data on how people actually use what you’ve built, and you should be looking for things that show which assumptions you’ve made are wrong, because those are the clues to what can be made better.

This all comes back to that necessary balance between science (hard data) and intuition. Usability testing and contextual research help us understand unfamiliar domains enough to kick off the design process. Intuition lets us meet those users’ needs in creative ways. And analytics, combined with qualitative user research methods, help us figure out where we got it wrong and how we can do better.

There are many kinds of people trying to make a living online. There are those who love retail and want to use the Internet to find efficiencies in merchandising and supply chain management. There are those who love the preciseness of search algorithms and want to do everything they can to figure out how to level up in that game. There are those who see the potential of selling “eyeballs” to advertisers and are desperately trying to grab enough of our attention to make that work.

Those are all perfectly fine ways to spend your days. But it’s not what drives me.

Then there are those who love the web. They understand that it’s people all the way down. That the real value of the things we make is in the shared experiences we get to have. They are passionate, critical, creative, opinionated, and cynical. Sometimes arrogant and not nice — but never apathetic. Never lazy enough to let something they care about get away with being less than great.

Those are the people I stand with.

We believe that the quality of what we put out there reflects on all of us. Flipboard and Clear make us all look good. Color makes us look like idiots, and we can’t stand it. When our own work doesn’t live up to our standards of quality for whatever reason, we lose sleep over it. We can’t shut up when we see the Internet being used as a game to be won, an endless well of content to “repurpose” for a quick ad buck, a way to trick people into clicking a link they don’t want to click on. It makes us obnoxious, yes, but we can’t just stand there and do nothing. For we will not have that sh*t. We will not have it.

To those who make a living online because they love the web: I stand with you.

If you secretly enjoy snarky writing as much as I do, you should read Paul Constant’s post called Yesterday, I Went to the American Idol for Startups. It Made Me Want to Die. It’s a scathing and funny rant about lazy, unimaginative use of language in business, and yet he ends with quite a poignant remark:

You can do anything you want with an idea. It can be as big as you want. It doesn’t have to solve a minor problem that nobody ever really realized was a problem. It doesn’t have to fit into something the size of a button crammed into a “folder” the size of a button on a screen the size of a playing card. But everywhere I look, I see tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality. And I come back to those cliches, and I think the real problem is in how little thought goes into the language these people use. When the language you employ to communicate your ideas is small and boring, your ideas are going to be small and boring. And when all your ideas are small and boring, your future gets dimmer and dimmer and more claustrophobic until it’s finally just a pinpoint of light on a dark screen, in danger of going out at any time.

Aaron Swartz discusses the possible problems of relying too much on scientific decision-making in Do I have too much faith in science?:

If you’re struggling with a decision, we’re taught to approach it more “scientifically”, by systematically enumerating pros and cons and trying to weight and balance them. That’s what Richard Feynman would do, right? Well, studies have shown that this sort of explicit approach repeatable leads to worse decisions than just going with your gut. Why? Presumably for the same reason: your gut is full of tacit knowledge that it’s tough to articulate and write down. Just focusing on the stuff you can make explicit means throwing away everything else you know—destroying your tacit knowledge.

My initial reaction was probably similar to yours. Something like this:

As expected, many commenters on Aaron’s post vehemently disagrees with him. Joe Blaylock asks:

You seem to take a narrow view of what science is and how it’s done. Is this rhetorical? Are you representing an extreme reductivist worldview to try to make a point?

gwern tells an interesting story to make his/her point:

‘One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”’

To bring this debate over into the world of design, I like Dmitry Fadeyev’s description of the different approaches as Primal (intuitive) vs. Cerebral (scientific). He concludes:

The best work is probably a combination of the two forces: restraining the primal force enough to yield a useful product that performs, but not ignoring it altogether so that the more basic human element is satisfied too, both in the creator and in the user.

Dmitri explores this theme more in his essay The Cerebral Designer:

Likewise, primal and cerebral design instincts are complements, not opposing forces. They are concerned with disparate goals which is why neither is better at achieving what the other sets out to do. If the design is driven only by the cerebral creative instinct, it will be too plain. If it is fully primal, it will not be very good at fulfilling its function for it would be more of an illustration or an ornamental piece than a design. Instead, if the primal is restrained by the cerebral but not yet fully killed, we arrive at a design that is functional, structured, pleasing to the eye and a joy for the designer to create.

I guess as designers we’re lucky. Instead of having to pick extreme points of view in an argument, in many cases the easy way out (calling for a middle ground) is also what’s best for our work. That is certainly the case here. We can combine things like A/B testing (within limits) with an intuitive humanity to design memorable, usable experiences.

I agree with Ian Storm Taylor1 — stay away from #000000:

When you put pure black next to a set of meticulously picked colors, the black overpowers everything else. It stands out because it’s not natural. All of the “black” everyday objects around you have some amount of light bouncing off of them, which means they aren’t black, they’re dark gray. And that light probably has a tint to it, so they’re not even dark gray, they’re colored-dark gray.

Read his post for the very interesting full argument.

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1. What an absolutely ridiculously awesome name. ↩