Alex Maughan gives some great front-end design and development tips in his article Mobile-first, semantic, and modular front-end design. If any part of your work touches front-end development, I highly recommend this piece. In addition to walking through the tools he uses (and his reasoning), Alex also makes a strong case for progressive enhancement:

Designs should be approached with a content-first and mobile-first mindset. Following this, CSS breakpoints should always be mobile-first. All JavaScript should be progressively enhanced and should be used at a conscientious minimum where possible. Therefore, the concept of progressive enhancement happens from all aspects, from design to development and back again.

All of this translates into websites that are much more future-friendly within a disruptive device and browser marketplace. It also has the added benefit of improving performance and guarding against fatal runtime errors that stop pages from working.

I haven’t yet linked to many pieces on progressive enhancement. As I went through my Pinboard links just now I realized that 2013 has been a big year for this topic. These are all the articles I know about that came out this year in strong defense of progressive enhancement:

• Progressive enhancement is still important
• Progressive Enhancement: Still Not Dead
• Progressive Enhancement. Still Alive & Kickin’
• Progressive enhancement is faster
• A plea for progressive enhancement
• Progressive Enhancement: It’s About the Content

I don’t know, it sounds like it’s not dead yet…

My fascination with how internet memes change language gets another healthy boost with Annalee Newitz’s excellent article We who spoke LOLcat now speak Doge:

In the internet meme war between cats and dogs, the dogs are currently winning. The “doge” meme features an image (often of an adorable shiba dog), annotated with distinctive phrases representing the thoughts of the dog — or the dragon, or whatever is being depicted. What has the internet gained in its move from LOLcats to doges?

I can’t decide which part to quote, so I just went for the opening paragraph and hope it will entice you to read the whole thing. Has there ever been a time like this, where language is changing so quickly and so completely?

Also, grammatical humor rocks.

Also, I love the internet.

Finally, I have a legitimate excuse for my obsession with sci-fi and post-apocalyptic literature. Apparently it’s going to make me a better designer. I’ll take it! Rebecca J. Rosen explains Why Today’s Inventors Need to Read More Science Fiction:

Once any sort of technology has users, it becomes extremely difficult to change it — even if you know it should or must be changed. […] How is that affecting our social structure and values? How is that changing the way we view ourselves and even the way we understand our own mental functioning? […]

Reading science fiction is like an ethics class for inventors, and engineers and designers should be trying to think like science fiction authors when they approach their own work. […] I feel with great urgency that we need to very thoughtfully consider what we build as well as encourage that same thoughtfulness out in the world.

I don’t write meta-posts often, but enough has happened this year that I wanted to give you a quick update on what’s going on. In an effort to make sure I don’t get too verbose, I’ll stick to a few short bullet points.

• We recently made some slight updates to Elezea’s design. We removed the texture, cleaned up some things, switched to Droid Sans, and made the primary color a bit more orange. Most importantly, the site is now mobile-first and sports a fancy new off-canvas menu. Once again, I’m indebted to Alex Maughan for his amazing design and development work. High five, Alex.
• This year I joined The Syndicate and AdPacks.com. I was quite worried about the response, but you guys have been awesome. It’s a testament to the quality of the audience (and the ads) that they are quite happy with the return they’re getting from advertising on Elezea. I have a love/hate relationship with ads, but I like the tasteful way these companies approach things, so it’s been a very good fit.
• I’m currently finishing up a book on Product Management that will hopefully be published around March/April next year. If you’d like to get updates on what’s going on with that, you can sign up for the newsletter.
• I’m quite impressed by Flipboard Magazines, and have recently started posting a lot of the articles that Elezea is based on (and things that don’t make it on here) to a companion magazine I imaginatively call Elezea Magazine. Please check it out, and share if you like it. It’s a really great platform.

I think that’s it. This has been a really cool year for Elezea, and I look forward to 2014. I feel privileged that you have chosen to take this hike with me. Thank you.

P.S. While we’re talking about other things, allow me to brag a little bit about where I live. I took this last week on an early morning run. If you haven’t been to Cape Town, you should definitely put it on your list.

Thanks to Atlassian for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week!

What’s the point of an agile standup meeting?

Gone are the days of 30-minute status meetings where most people are half-asleep or pecking away on their laptops, oblivious to what’s being said. Agile standups are the leaner, more efficient cousin of status meetings where attendees actually stand up. On our feet, we’re more focused, attentive, and concise. It’s science!

Whether you need robust tools for planning and tracking projects, communicating with coworkers, deploying products, or just some general tips on how to run an agile shop (and how to run them Rong?), Atlassian is here to offer you the tools and advice you need to get the most out of your agile practice.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

David Streitfeld takes an interesting look at the complicated relationship between digital and physical books in Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind. This part jumped out at me, because it points to a mistake companies often make:

“A lot of these solutions were born out of a programmer’s ability to do something rather than the reader’s enthusiasm for things they need,” said Peter Meyers, author of “Breaking the Page,” a forthcoming look at the digital transformation of books. “We pursued distractions and called them enhancements.”

As Barbara Nelson points out in Who Needs Product Management?:

It is vastly easier to identify market problems and solve them with technology than it is to find buyers for your existing technology.

That’s the mistake that many ebook companies made. They let technology lead, where the better solution is to be led by user needs.

Lisa Maria Martin gives some advice on What To Do With Those Dreaded FAQs:

These all underscore FAQs’ fatal flaw: they are content without context, delivered without regard for the larger experience of the website. You can hear the absurdity in the name itself: if users are asking the same questions so frequently, then there is an obvious gulf between their needs and the site content. (And if not, then we have a labeling problem.) Instead of sending users to a jumble of maybe-it’s-here-maybe-it’s-not questions, the answers to FAQs should be found naturally throughout a website. They are not separated, not isolated, not other. They are the content.

We’re definitely in agreement about that. A while I go I wrote this:

Most users don’t know what FAQ stands for, and besides, it’s bad practice to answer questions outside the context people want to ask them in. Figure out where in the process each question in your FAQ might come up, and provide the answer right there within the flow. Don’t expect people to click to a different page to find the information they need.

By the way, 24 ways is a collection of fantastic design and development articles and tutorials for advent. If it’s not part of your daily reading yet, make it so!

So much has been written about the disastrous launch of healthcare.gov. But Sheryl Solberg and Michael Shear’s Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Care Site, and Obama hit especially close to home. Much of it reads like any number of software development projects I’ve been involved in over the years:

In Herndon, as engineers tried to come to grips with repeated crashes, a host of problems were becoming apparent: inadequate capacity in its data center and sloppy computer code, partly the result of rushed work amid the rapidly changing specifications issued by the government. […]

The website had barely been tested before it went live, so a large number of software and hardware defects had not been uncovered. Fixing the account creation software simply exposed other problems; people still could not register to buy insurance. A system intended to handle 50,000 simultaneous users was fundamentally unstable, unable to handle even a tiny fraction of that. As few as 500 users crippled it, according to people involved.

Rushed work amid rapidly changing specifications… No testing before going live…

Let him who has never experienced issues like that on a project cast the first negative blog post.