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I just read the following sentence in some digital strategy PDF thing:

As digital adds value to the customer experience there is an opportunity to amplify what the person experiences on the application.

I have no idea what that means, and I don’t think anyone does. The state of business writing is just abysmal right now. So many words that sound fancy but don’t mean a thing. Here’s another example from something I had to read last week:

Economic volatility plus consumer tech revolution is changing customers’ expectation of brands.

Uh, what?

Anyway, I just started reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, a book I should have read a long time ago. First published more than 30 years ago, it’s still engaging and fresh. Consider this passage, which I couldn’t get out of my head as I read through those “digital strategy” documents:

Still, we have become a society fearful of revealing who we are. The institutions that seek our support by sending us their brochures sound remarkably alike, though surely all of them — hospitals, schools, libraries, museums, zoos — were founded and are still sustained by men and women with different dreams and visions. Where are these people? It’s hard to glimpse them among all the impersonal passive sentences that say “initiatives were undertaken” and “priorities have been identified.”

We all need to heed Zinsser’s advice on simple writing:

Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn’t think of saying it may rain. The sentence is too simple—there must be something wrong with it.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what — these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.

This is something I want to be a lot more cognisant of in my own writing going forward. So feel free to call me on it when I get too verbose.

This Interview with Clive Thompson About Twitter, Ambient Awareness, Socrates, and Recency Bias is really interesting. Clive has a decidedly more positive take on technology than what we’ve come to expect recently:

There’s an idea, popular with many text-based folks—like myself, and many journalists and academics—that reading books is thinking; that if you’re not sitting for hours reading a tome, you’re not, in some essential way, thinking. This is completely false. A huge amount of our everyday thinking—powerful, creative, and resonant stuff—is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us. This has been true for aeons in the offline world. But now we have new ways to think socially online—and to do so with likeminded folks around the world, which is still insanely mind-blowing. It never stops being lovely for me.

The interview covers some of the material Clive talks about in his new book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, which is definitely next on my list (after On Writing Well, which is kicking my butt right now). Also, I don’t know if this will be interesting to anyone, but I share highlights from the ebooks I read on the Twitter account @rianisreading.

As I saw the tweets about Jared Spool‘s talk at Warm Gun fly by, I hoped that someone would do a write-up because it sounded really interesting. I didn’t expect Forbes to come to the rescue, but hey, hell froze over! Anthony Kosner does of good job of distilling Jared’s main points in How Design And User Experience Translates To The Bottom Line:

In UX Strategy Means Business, Spool clued a room full of designers and developers into the five business priorities that they must consider as the ultimate goals of their efforts. Yes, as a designer you must be the strong voice for aesthetics and some of the more subtle aspects of user experience, but your bosses need something more concrete to respond to.

And yes, you’ll have to click through (and dismiss the ad, ugh) to see those five business priorities.

The fifth and final Build Conf looks like it was, once again, a fantastic conference for web designers. The talks are still coming out, but so far there are two that really stood out for me. The first is Paul Soulellis’s Resistance — a fantastic essay on what an act of resistance looks like in design culture today:

I worry that this tendency to dismiss on the fly — as well as accumulating approval — might push us to make things for their ability to go viral. Designing for the showcase and rewarding smooth, easily digestible stories has become a kind of professional “code,” and I think this is where it gets dangerous.

Because some see it as permission to favor the quick fix of image-making over complex problem-solving. How many times have you been asked to build the site in a week. To design the logo in two days. To send files, right now. Somehow, we’re becoming a culture that values performance and instant product over presence.

Frank Chimero’s What Screens Want is another absolute must-read — one of the best essays of 2013. Frank goes on a journey to find the essence of digital design:

A designer’s work is not only about how the things look, but also their behaviors in response to interaction, and the adjustments they make between their fixed states. In fact, designing the way elements adapt and morph in the in-between moments is half of your work as a designer. You’re crafting the interstitials.

Both of these essays not only contain thought-provoking ideas, they’re also beautifully designed. Do yourself a favor and spend some time reading through both.

By now it’s been well drilled into our heads that web design starts with content, not with graphics. However, in practice, getting real content before the design process starts is challenging at the best of times, and it’s made even more difficult by the fact that we have to try to get to content parity across all types of devices.

So to deal with this complexity we come up with more pragmatic guidelines. Mark Boulton’s “Structure First. Content Always.” is certainly a more realistic approach:

You can create good experiences without knowing the content. What you can’t do is create good experiences without knowing your content structure. What is your content made from, not what your content is. An important distinction.

So you have to start with the structure not the words. […] How do we design around the fluidity? Well, we define structure; of our content, and the templates that content inhabits. We define the rules of the system to display the content in different ways (if we can) to help the reader understand the content better.

The problem with all these approaches has always been the same for me: It sounds awesome in theory, but I don’t know how to make it part of our workflow when we’re in the weeds with client work. So we tend to try to make physical things that help us get there¹. First we created expanded customer journey maps to define a content plan based on user needs and personas.

That helped a lot, but on the next project we got stuck on content structure again — how do we create different page templates with different types of content, without getting into interaction design too soon? So we came up with the idea of Content Modules: diagrams that show the relative importance and length of different types of content, in a Mobile First context. Here’s an example:

This document has a few key components:

• Each block outline represent a distinct content chunk that can be used on any other page.
• The primary call to action is highlighted (in orange in the example above) so that we can easily check for consistency and impact across different pages.
• Some pages will have optional modules — those are also highlighted (in yellow in the example above).
• A gap in a column doesn’t mean there’s going to be empty space on the page. This is not a layout diagram. It just shows the relative importance of each chunk. It also allows one to easily compare which page templates have which types of content on the page. This lets you easily spot if there’s some missing content (or unneccesary duplication).
• Each page template looks like a mobile view. That’s by design. It helps us to move straight into designing mobile views first, using the content hierarchy defined in the document, and then scale that up to larger views.

Creating content modules was the missing step we needed to bridge the gap between the content plan in our expanded customer journey maps, and starting the interaction design / prototyping phase. I was constantly worried that we’d start projects with content at the centre, but then gradually backslide into old ways as the project progresses. This document helps us to move seamlessly from content planning to interaction design, confident that we’re designing on the right content-led foundation.

Brad Frost’s article on the Techcrunch redesign is a great case study of a modern responsive design process. A few things stood out for me, and remain open questions that I wish I could ask Brad about.

First, there is no mention of user research. There was a kick-off meeting, with some Design Studio work, but how did they identify user needs, and why was there no user testing on their prototypes? That’s a bit perplexing.

Second, it’s really nice to see Brad take a more nuanced stance on the whole Post-PSD Era thing, and admit that comps can be useful under the right circumstances:

Believe it or not, we did indeed create a few full comps. Gasp! Horror!

But the difference between this and all the other projects I’ve ever worked on is that we didn’t lead with the comps. By the time Dan made some comps (for the homepage and featured article page), we had established many of our key molecules and organisms, and had an understanding of the systematic nature of our design.

That’s how we do it in our agency as well, so I’m glad to find out that we’re not completely insane.

And lastly, it would’ve been great to get a little more detail on how much backend developers were involved through the process. Brad mentions it briefly:

From the design end of things, Dan went through and created an incredibly detailed list of minor design tweaks that tightened things up and got things ready for final delivery to be implemented into their WordPress backend by the fine folks at 10up (who by the way were involved throughout the course of this process).

“Final delivery” and “were involved throughout” are two phrases that don’t sit very well together, so I wonder how that worked practically.

Don’t get me wrong — this is a great process, and they obviously got some impressive results. These are just some things I wondered about as I read through the case study.

Daniel Jalkut discusses the rate of software/app updates in Stagnation Or Stability?:

As an onlooker, it’s easy to associate dramatic change and motion with competence, and quiet refinement with laziness. We must draw on our own experiences attempting to build great things to appreciate how much work takes place in stillness, to have faith that even though things may appear stagnant, a benefit of frictionlessness is resulting. An app at rest may be in that long, arduous phase of becoming finely crafted.

Daniel’s post is a response to the recent Michael Lopp article R.I.P. Things, in which he explains that he’s dropping Things as his productivity app mainly because of its lack of updates. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. How our expectations about app pricing and rate of change is placing unfair (and damaging) pressure on developers to release new versions of their apps constantly — even if it’s just change for the sake of change.

The other unintended consequence of this never-ending update cycle is that we’re starting to see evidence of what Chris Bowler calls App Fatigue:

I must admit, I’ve felt a bit of what I term app fatigue in the past year. What is this? Simply the lack of desire to either a) pay for another version of an app I already own or b) go through the steps required to update this app and become accustomed to the changes.

My own feelings about this remain wildly erratic at the moment. Sometimes I’m on Michael’s side. Like most people I was champing at the bit for Tweetbot 3, and as much as I appreciated the “It’ll be ready when it’s ready” line, my impatience got the better of me. Yesterday Apple “finally” updated their last built-in app for iOS 7. But we’re still stuck with an ugly WhatsApp, orphaned versions of OmniFocus, Tweetbot and Instapaper for iPad, and a Foursquare that hasn’t been updated in weeks — weeks, I tell you. What up with that? I turned off automatic app updates because I love going to the App Store and checking what wonderful new things I’m going to get today.

And then, at other times, I’m with Chris Bowler. OmniFocus runs my life, so I shouldn’t complain about paying $20 for the gorgeous new iPhone version, but it ended up being quite the grudge purchase. Same with Fantastical 2. And I know that my insatiable hunger for new features every day is probably doing more damage than good. Because Daniel is right: “An app at rest may be in that long, arduous phase of becoming finely crafted.” But if we show up at developers’ doors with pitchforks every couple of weeks, demanding our new features, there is no time for the app to be at rest. Eventually, Experience Rot will set in, and it will be our fault:

As more features are added, it becomes harder to make the overall design coherent and sensical. Soon features are crammed into corners that don’t make sense.

I guess I’m preaching to myself here. I’m hoping to convince myself to be a bit more patient with app developers, and give them the time they need to slow down and refine.