Thanks to The Theme Foundry for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week! As a reminder, I am traveling this week so there won’t be much activity, but all should be back to normal on Monday.

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Today I’m going on what is sure to be one of the most interesting trips of my career. I’m going to do a week of UX and Product Management training and consulting for an e-commerce company in Tehran, Iran. It also includes a public event where I’ll be chatting with the broader Tehran UX community about responsive design and product management.

It’s going to be a busy trip with 6 days of solid work, so this is a heads-up that Elezea will probably be very quiet next week. That said, I’ll definitely do a big write-up of the experience once I’m back. I’m really interested to see what life in Tehran is like, and what challenges and opportunities the web community there are dealing with.

Since I feel bad about not writing much over the next week or so, here is a gif of a giraffe that’s not impressed:

See you on the other side!

I really enjoyed this interview with Flipboard’s Marcos Weskamp about the ephemeral nature of digital design. From David Zax’s write-up, How Flipboard’s Head Designer Grapples With The Web’s Manic Pace Of Change:

Graphic design today, says Weskamp, is something like making mandalas, the ritual symbols sometimes designed by monks. Mandalas are occasionally made of soaps, sands, or powders, rendering them inherently ephemeral. Many artists do their work in the hopes of creating something lasting. The makers of mandalas, by contrast, devote hours to meticulous works of artistry that might easily be dispensed with by a gust of wind.

And so it is with web design, where the gusts of ever-changing user demand blow especially fiercely. “I don’t think it’s tragic,” says Weskamp. “It’s something you learn over the years. It’s more a way of being.”

Ian McAllister states a common rallying cry of the Lean movement in his answer to the Quora question What should a lean startup functional spec / product requirements doc look like?:

Functional specs or product requirements documents invite scope creep and are walking dead documents.

I’d like to start my rebuttal with something Joel Spolsky wrote in Painless Functional Specifications – Part 1, back in 2000:

Failing to write a spec is the single biggest unnecessary risk you take in a software project. It’s as stupid as setting off to cross the Mojave desert with just the clothes on your back, hoping to “wing it.” Programmers and software engineers who dive into code without writing a spec tend to think they’re cool gunslingers, shooting from the hip. They’re not. They are terribly unproductive. They write bad code and produce shoddy software, and they threaten their projects by taking giant risks which are completely uncalled for.

Having said that, I’ll admit that the majority of specification documents are bad. Meaning they are long, they are boring, they are done just to check a box to say they were done, they are written once and never updated, and most importantly, they don’t get used during development. That is a situation Product Managers desperately need to avoid. If a spec isn’t being used actively during development, it’s not the developer’s fault, it’s the Product Manager’s fault. It’s up to the Product Manager to understand what kind of document would be useful to developers, and then provide such a document — one that is much, much better than winging it.

The Functional Spec describes how a product works from a user’s perspective. It’s not focused on how it will be implemented (that’s covered in the Technical Spec), but on defining flows and screens, and how users will experience the product. This might sound a bit academic to some, and against the spirit of the Lean movement that’s all about “getting out of the deliverables business”, but we have to remember that documentation isn’t bad. Bad documentation is bad. Good functional specs help teams communicate, save time, and build better products. But to make sure your functional specs fall into the “good documentation” category, there are a few important points to remember:

• Specs should be dynamic. They are not written once and forgotten about. This is why specs shouldn’t be written in Microsoft Word (no more “v27_FINAL4.docx” filenames). Instead, use collaborative tools like a Wiki or Google Docs to make it easier to edit and access the most recent version.
• Specs should be accessible. The spec document isn’t something that the PM writes in isolation before coming down the mountain to hand over their “Ten Commandments” to the development team to implement. Anyone in the organization should be able to access the specs at any time, and team members should be able to ask questions and contribute to the spec. That’s another reason why Word is out, and online collaborative tools are in. Seriously, uninstall Microsoft Word.
• Specs should be flexible. The biggest and most valid criticism of most functional spec documents is that they are too rigid. Most are merely a list of requirements that were written by people far away from actual implementation, and once their job is done, they are unable to adapt in the face of reality. That’s not how it should work. The last 20% (or more) of a spec is always going to happen during development. That’s not only normal, it’s healthy. It means that teams can adapt to the needs of the products and users, and that they are willing to remove, change, or add features if needed (i.e. if the user evidence or business need is there).

The spec isn’t a document that the PM writes the day before development starts. This is a document that is started as soon as a new project kicks off. Create a template in your wiki (or wherever the plan is to store specs), and open it up as soon you start working on a new project. The best way to write a spec is to add information to it as it becomes available. Add the customer journey map as soon as you have it. Add sketches as soon as you move into the prototyping phase. This reinforces that idea that it’s a living document that is open to collaboration, and it also breaks up the workload so that it doesn’t feel like a huge effort to create the spec.

It’s essential to only add relevant content to the spec — nothing more. For some smaller projects it might be ok to skip the customer journey and prototyping phase, and move straight from sketching to graphic design and/or development. That’s ok. Don’t think of the different sections that make up a spec as above the law, think of them as an a la carte menu that you can pick and choose from based on the needs of the project.

Many people roll their eyes at functional specifications, believing it’s part of an old school way of doing Product Management that isn’t relevant any more. But I’ll repeat what I said earlier: specs aren’t bad. Bad specs are bad. If you create documentation that people actually use to build the product and understand why certain decisions were made, how can you argue that it’s not useful? So my advice is, don’t stop writing specs. Just start writing really good ones.

I’m currently working on a Product Management book, to be published by Smashing Magazine early next year. In the book I go into much more detail on the ingredients of a good functional spec. If you’re interested in getting notified when the book comes up, you can sign up here.

A big thanks to Igloo for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week. Check them out!

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

It’s not that I didn’t always have a strong connection with my eldest daughter. It’s just that recently, as she’s running headlong into her fifth year of life, we’ve started to connect in ways I didn’t expect. For example, this weekend we spent most of early Sunday morning building Lego models together. How did that happen? How did she suddenly get into stuff I remember liking as a child?

I know everyone always talks about how quickly kids grow up. I don’t agree with that at all. Growing up takes a long time. But I do find these sudden jumps in growth quite surprising sometimes. I feel like I should be better prepared for each jump so I can catch her if she stumbles. I guess that feeling will never go away. Especially when she starts dating. Man. That’s going to be rough.

Anyway. I’m really into coffee. And this morning my wife brought the girls to our office for a visit. I made my daughter a Babycino (frothed milk + hot chocolate sprinkles), and I made myself a flat white (both pictured above). While I was making the drinks my daughter sat at the table, and asked me questions about what I’m doing and how the espresso machine works. I talked to her about coffee extraction and crema and milk steaming, thinking that would bore her to tears. But she was really into it. So I kept going and talked to her about craft and why it’s cool to take your time to learn how to do things well and how good it makes you feel when you really master something.

They left hours ago, but I’m still thinking about the brief time I had with my daughter this morning. I can’t help but feel like it was an important moment, and that I should create more of those types of moments with her. And not just with her, but with friends and colleagues too. A discussion about craft — especially if it happens around that craft — usually leads into a discussion about passion, and that easily spirals out of control to anything from a new appreciation of life to brilliant product ideas.

A big part of the joy of learning and practising a craft is the gathering of people around its edges, and the ideas that are sparked and shared as a result. We should actively create and seek out those moments of collaborative creative thinking.

I’m mesmerised by the animations in iOS 7, and none more so than the experience of opening and exiting an app within a folder. To me, it feels like you’re doing Parkour through your apps, deftly using your surroundings to propel yourself forward and maintain as much momentum as possible.

It’s also a great example of iOS 7’s depth, and proof that the design is not as flat as most people would have us believe. Justin Williams sums this up really well in his post Layer Cake:

iOS 7 is designed to be a backlit experience that has each view stacked on top of the previous one based on its z-axis. […]

You’re seeing a lot more focus on transparency and blurs so that you can continue to see the content underneath your front-most view. Modal view controllers are no longer primarily taking over the screen entirely allowing you to maintain a sense of where you came from.

Calling iOS 7 non-innovative seems really short-sighted to me. I think it’s the start of a new, much more understandable metaphor in software design, and I can’t wait to see where it ends up.

This isn’t a zombie blog¹. Still, I’d be doing you a huge disservice if I didn’t tell you about two excellent zombie books I read recently. The books are great because yes, they have zombies in them, but they’re not actually about zombies. They’re about how humans treat each other when we turn on each other. How it’s easy to speak about our values but a bit harder to stick to those values when the going gets really tough. And that’s a topic worth exploring.

The first book I want to recommend is World War Z. The BOOK, not the movie! I saw the movie, and it’s fine, but it is not even remotely similar to the book. I don’t even know why they kept the title. It’s really strange. You should still see the movie, because it’s fun, but the book is something completely different. It is, as the subtitle promises, “an oral history of the zombie war”. The war happened. It’s over. This is a book about people reflecting on what went down. And it is fascinating.

There are commentaries about the media:

The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. “Fear,” he used to say, “fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.” That blew me away. “Turn on the TV,” he’d say. “What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.” Fuckin’ A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells. That was my mantra. “Fear sells.”

There are commentaries on what happens when “knowledge work” is not needed any more:

You’re a high-powered corporate attorney. You’ve spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That’s the way the world works. But one day it doesn’t. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.

And what happens when those workers relearn how to do stuff with their hands:

It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.

And finally, on freedom:

Freedom isn’t just something you have for the sake of having, you have to want something else first and then want the freedom to fight for it.

The deep thought that went into this book results in an engrossing story full of detail that makes you think about your everyday relationships, and what might happen if those relationships are strained beyond their limits. I loved it.

The second book is The Passage. First, the backstory is great. The author first began developing his ideas for the book when his daughter asked him to write a book about a “girl who saves the world.” Well, it’s about a girl, and she tries to save the world, but it’s like no hero story you’ve read before. It starts when the zombie apocalypse picks up steam, and then jumps ahead 100 years to focus on how one isolated community is dealing with the aftermath. In contrast to World War Z, the war is very much not over in The Passage. It’s gruesome at times, but again, beautifully written.

From interesting reflections on what zombies represent:

What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?

To what it means to believe in the future:

A baby wasn’t an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn’t care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living.

And the nature of hope:

Courage is easy, when the alternative is getting killed. It’s hope that’s hard.

The Passage is not just a great story (I couldn’t put it down), but also another interesting look at what happens when circumstances bring out the worst (and the best) in humans.

All this got me thinking again about an article I read recently about the Zombie Renaissance in literature. And I realised how true this part is about these two books:

We are living in a time when what counts as “life” is in significant scientific dispute, and in the heyday of zombie computers and zombie banks, zombie this and zombie that. Why wouldn’t we also be living in a time of zombie literary forms? Whatever their specific emphases and intricacies, all these zombies represent a plague of suspended agency, a sense that the human world is no longer (if it ever was) commanded by individuals making rational decisions. Instead we are witnessing a slow, compulsive, collective movement toward Malthusian self-destruction. Of course all monsters are projections of human fears, but only zombies make this fundamentally social and self-accusatory charge: we the people are the problem we cannot solve. We outnumber ourselves.

If this is an idea that interests you, I highly recommend these books. Even if you don’t like zombies, you’ll appreciate the thoughtful writing and gripping stories. Do it.