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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Jessi Hempel’s The second coming of Facebook is a very interesting profile of the company and where it’s headed. There’s one paragraph in particular that has stuck with me for the past few days:

At Facebook developers choose the projects they want to work on, and product groups compete to woo them. Managers sent out reports highlighting the product teams that were doing a good job. Pretty quickly teams realized that if they wanted to get praised in the weekly memo, they needed to start recruiting mobile developers.

My first thought was that this is a great idea. If you want to get something done at Facebook, your idea has to be interesting and challenging enough to convince developers to work on it, otherwise it just won’t happen. I’m sure this weeds out a lot of ill-conceived project ideas.

But there’s a problem with this approach. If Product Managers have to convince developers to work on their projects, they are going to pitch ideas that have a big chance of being interesting to… developers. Not to Facebook users. So there’s a danger that the product features being pushed out are wild and challenging and extremely interesting, but don’t meet user needs particularly well.

In the example cited in the article, an internal weekly memo effectively changed the company’s entire roadmap by shifting attention to mobile. Not that shifting to mobile is a bad thing, but too much focus on things like who gets praised in an email has the potential to seriously derail a company.

Still, the idea is really appealing: making Product Managers effectively vie for developer attention ensures that the PMs do their homework so that they can sell and defend their ideas to the company and to customers. That’s a worthy cause. It would be great to make some form of user validation part of what happens before projects are pitched, though. I guess I just remain weary of the prevailing myth that we are like our users.

In his post Why we fear Facebook and why we shouldn’t Paul Jacobson makes an interesting counterpoint to the common refrain that it’s bad to share our personal data with companies:

Conventional wisdom is that if you are not paying for a product, you are the product. That may be true, as a generalisation. I prefer to think it isn’t so much we who are the products on Facebook but rather our preferences and attention. What does that buy us? For starters, it buys us Facebook, Twitter, Google services and more. It also buys us slightly less annoying ads that can be remarkably relevant. It buys advertisers a better chance that we may want to buy their products and services because those products and services may just be what we are looking for at that point in time.

It’s a good question. Is it really that bad to get highly targeted ads in our news feeds? The more targeted the ads are, the more useful they are to us, right? So why is there such pushback against this trend in companies like Google and Facebook to try to find out everything they can about us?

I think there are three main reasons why we need to be wary of letting ad-driven companies know too much about our preferences, even if they just use it to serve us more targeted information and ads.

1. It makes the web smaller

If we only see stuff we’re already interested in, we run the risk of becoming sucked into the Internet’s “filter bubble”, where it’s much harder to discover new information beyond our current knowledge. Maria Popova puts it like this in Are We Becoming Cyborgs?:

The Web by and large is really well designed to help people find more of what they already know they’re looking for, and really poorly designed to help us discover that which we don’t yet know will interest us and hopefully even change the way we understand the world.

When an algorithmic constraint is placed on the information we see, and that constraint is based solely on our current preferences, we will remain safely locked into the world we know. That means that we become less likely to broaden our horizons with new discoveries.

2. It results in heightened confirmation bias

When we’re steeped in information that confirms our existing beliefs (regardless of whether those beliefs are true or not) we not only seek out more of the same information everywhere we go, but we also become incapable of changing our minds even if we eventually are presented with the truth (the denial of Global Warming is a good example of this…). This is called confirmation bias, and Clay Johnson writes about it in the context of media and the Internet in his book The Information Diet:

It’s too high of a cognitive and ego burden to surround ourselves with people that we disagree with. If you’re a Facebook user, try counting up the number of friends you have who share your political beliefs. Unless you’re working hard to do otherwise, it’s likely that you’ve surrounded yourself with people who skew towards your beliefs. Now look beyond political beliefs—how many of your friends share the same economic class as you? […]

Those algorithms are everywhere: our web searches, our online purchases, our advertisements. This network of predictions is what Pariser calls the Filter Bubble in his book by the same name—the network of personalization technology that figures out what you want and keeps feeding you that at the expense of what you don’t want.

So, for example, through its EdgeRank algorithm Facebook figures out what we like and what we believe in, and then shows us stories and ads that confirm those beliefs. It doesn’t care about truth, it cares about engagement — even if that engagement comes at the expense of what is right.

3. It designs our lives for us

This is true for all advertising, but even more so for hyper-targeted advertising: it tries to sell us stuff we don’t necessarily need. Yes, I know we’re tired of hearing how we should all live with less stuff blah blah blah. That’s not necessarily what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that we need to be careful that we don’t become a society built around the needs of corporations. David Cain talks about this in his chilling essay called Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed:

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. […]

The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

There’s nothing wrong with stuff, of course. But there is something scarily wrong about the way we let our desires be dictated by advertising — especially targeted advertising by companies that know us so well.

What it means…

I don’t think our biggest fears about the data that companies collect about us should revolve around identity theft or the government coming to get us (although, in some regions, that’s certainly legitimate concerns). Our biggest fear should be what Huxley points to in the future he paints in Brave New World: that we will be ruled by what he calls “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. Huxley believed we should fear companies who aim to control us by inflicting pleasure on us, and I think he might have been on to something.

I know that sounds really alarmist. But still, I can’t look at my Facebook news feed and not think about this possible future. That’s why I think we should hold our personal data and preferences just a little bit closer to our hearts.

I always enjoy the interviews on The Great Discontent, and this one with designer Matthew Smith is no exception. Here he describes how he turned his hobby into a business:

At the time, my wife was pregnant, we had a one year old, and we were all living on about $26,000 a year—I knew I had to think bigger, so I went for it. I got the first $8,000 job and then another. Then people started asking me to build more things, like customer databases. I would nod in agreement as if to say, “Of course I can do that,” and then I’d get off the phone, crap my pants, and go do research on Google, ask questions on forums, and figure it out in order to deliver a product to a client and make them happy with the results. Done!

I can certainly relate to the get off the phone → crap pants → figure it out workflow. I also like Matthew’s critical take on the concept of endless feeds on the Internet:

Who came up with the idea of endless content constantly streaming toward us? There’s this unlimitedness that concerns me because it is so unlike the rest of the human experience and I think it confuses the human mind and puts us into a space where we aren’t at our best. I want to make sure that no matter the project or company I’m involved with, I’m always asking if it’s serving the human best and helping us be at our best.

That last part reminds me of something Alex Griendling said recently:

Our work does not exist in a vacuum; it is given context and meaning and power by the places it appears and the people that benefit from its usage. When clients hire us, they’re doing so because they believe it will benefit them. With this in mind, it’s important to ask yourself the question “Is this client worth helping?”. If great work is made for those that exhibit repugnant practices, how does this benefit anyone other than the individual client?

Words to live by…

This post provides background and additional resources for my talk on Responsive Web Design in Africa. Last update: May 23, 2013.

I’ve seen a surprising amount of pushback on responsive design within the South African web community recently. The skepticism is mostly based on issues such as low smartphone share and high data costs in Africa, along with assumptions about “the mobile context” and how people supposedly have vastly different needs on mobile phones than they have on their desktops.

So, the purpose of this talk is to summarize the case for Responsive Web Design, and to argue that the reasons against using this approach in Africa don’t hold up. Smartphones and data access are exploding in Africa, so if we want to be Future Friendly, we don’t have a choice. We have to adapt.

The slides for the talk are below, although of course, some context gets lost without the voiceover. There are also embedded gifs and videos that obviously don’t play within Slideshare, so you’ll have to use your imagination on those…

Resources

I cite the source for each quote, example, and data point on the applicable slide, but I thought it would be helpful to provide a brief list of Responsive Web Design resources here for easy reference.

For those who want to dig a little deeper on the data in Africa, here’s a list of the reports and presentations I found most useful:

• GSMA’s Mobile Observatory Series, particularly the report African Mobile Observatory 2011 (PDF link)
• Insights into Mobile Telecoms in Africa by Jon Hoehler and Andrew McHenry
• The Smartphone Snapshot Showdown by Jon Hoehler and Andrew McHenry
• Key findings from the Mobile Africa 2012 report (thanks to Ethan Marcotte for this link)
• Insights into the mobile-only generation

Here’s an incomplete list of introductory articles to get you started on responsive design. These articles mainly touch on topics I bring up in the talk, like the reasons for adopting responsive design, performance issues, and RESS:

• Define :: Responsive (a demo to show people how it works)
• Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It
• Reasons for Responsive Design
• Responsive web design: the war has not yet been won (More reasons)
• Content Parity (Relates to the “Mobile is Less” myth)
• Impact of Responsive Designs (Some good data on the benefits of responsive design)
• Where to Start (How to start adjusting workflows)
• Prioritizing Performance in Responsive Design
• Conditional Loading for Responsive Designs (On progressive enhancement)
• Getting started with RESS (Server-side components to deal with lower end phones)
• Responsive Deliverables (What you can expect from your design team or agency)

If you’re looking for responsive patterns, start here:

• Brad Frost’s collection of patterns and modules for responsive designs
• Responsive navigation plugin (without library dependencies and with fast touch screen support)
• Some more patterns for dealing with navigation
• Responsive Multi-Level Menu Demos
• Alternative ways to optimize navigation across touch devices (Luke Wroblewski and Jason Weaver)

And here are some ideas for dealing with responsive images:

• Adaptive Images in HTML
• Responsible Responsive Images by Mat Marquis
• ReSRC.it (Responsive images on demand, directly from the cloud)
• A small set of CSS classnames to help keep images cropped on the focal point
• A quick intro to Icon Fonts

For more great resources on responsive design, see Jeremy Keith’s extensive list.

The point

My goal with this talk was not to say anything groundbreakingly new about Responsive Web Design. The goal was to urge designers and developers who work in developing regions to take responsive design seriously, and at the very least consider the approach for their next projects.

If you have any questions or comments (or are interested in having me come present this talk somewhere), please get in touch.

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Benjamin Samuel dissects the humble comma in the absolutely brilliant The Comma From Which My Heart Hangs. But it’s his enraged rant against the use of apostrophes to indicate possession that really makes this a special essay:

My colleagues might argue that the apostrophe is a perfectly normal, even useful, if not vital punctuation mark. But I say that if language adapts with the times, then it is representative of society, and that if our need for awarding possession is so great as to warrant such a tawdry and sickening punctuation mark, then the apostrophe is indicative of precisely what is wrong with our society: our inability to communicate effectively, to build relationships, to share and support the goals of others—even when those goals mean working temporarily but yet quite hard in a less glamorous position as one pursues a more respectable appointment among his true colleagues.

I don’t personally have a gripe with the apostrophe, but his passion will definitely make me more wary of our obsession with owning things. Good writing often has that effect — it forces us to look at old things in new ways.

I liked Meng To’s Simplifying For The Wrong Reasons, but there’s one part that perpetuates one of the most enduring myths in user experience design:

The best user experience reduces the amount of clicks to as few as possible.

No one’s going to argue that we should add superfluous clicks in interfaces. But making “as few clicks as possible” an optimization goal is how interfaces become bloated and crammed with cruft. As Lukas Mathis points out in his explanation of the psychological behavior called “satisficing”:

A great user interface is not one where each goal can be reached with the smallest number of clicks possible, or where the user has to pick from only a small number of choices at each step, but one where each individual click is as obvious as possible. […] As long as users feel that they are getting closer to their goal with each step, they don’t mind drilling down into a deep hierarchy.

Josh Clark also addresses the myth that extra taps and clicks are evil in an interview with Forbes:

In mobile, tap quality is far more important than tap quantity. As long as each tap delivers satisfaction, extra taps are good. Taps invite conversation—give and take—that you can get at and explore. Building meaningful click sequences are a form of progressive disclosure that helps you uncomplicate complexity.

So, let’s get away from this idea that we should optimize for the fewest number of clicks and taps. Instead, we should optimize for an information architecture and visual hierarchy that makes the next step as obvious as possible. Joshua Porter summarizes this approach nicely:

Almost every screen we design can be improved by really focusing on the steps and sequences of steps a user goes through. In our haste we often speed up the process too much, get steps out of order, fail to present an appropriate next step, or otherwise break the sequence. By re-assessing your app or site in light of these potential errors, you can discover the sequence and timing that your users need to successfully make it to the next step.