Dmitri Fadeyev wrote a good critique of the recent design trend we see in redesigns of sites like The Next Web, Mashable, and ReadWrite. From Redesign Trend in Tech News Sites: Big, Responsive and Content Heavy:

While I like the style direction, I think these sites are trying a little too hard to work like apps, and in doing so, they surrender the strengths of the plain website, namely: simple, responsive navigation mechanisms. Simple sites don’t lag and don’t have any ambiguous navigation elements. They behave like a page, which, while being a constraint, is not necessarily a bad thing. The new wave of responsive redesigns in tech news sites certainly look good with their nice typography and healthy use of whitespace, but they feel heavy, they don’t feel right in the browser. They look more like apps but the speed and responsiveness of a native app just isn’t there.

I think we’re in a period of enthusiastic over-reaching as more and more content sites discover the power of good typography and responsive design. It’s great to see major sites taking risks and experimenting with this stuff. The enthusiasm is fantastic. But I hope that we’ll eventually get through the flashy phase to reach a maturity level in responsive design where the text can truly speak for itself without relying on fancy gimmicks to draw attention to itself.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art currently has a great exhibition of 200 photographs from the 1840s to early 1990s called Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop. From the description:

The urge to modify camera images is as old as photography itself—only the methods have changed. Nearly every type of manipulation we now associate with digital photography was also part of the medium’s pre-digital repertoire: smoothing away wrinkles, slimming waistlines, adding people to a scene (or removing them)—even fabricating events that never took place.

Here’s an example, with more at the bottom of this post:

The Pond – Moonrise (technique: multiple printing)

The exhibition is split up into different themes, and I was particularly interested in the section they call Artifice In the Name of Art:

The tradition of fine-art photography continued with Pictorialism, a movement that began in Europe in the 1880s and soon took hold in the United States. The Pictorialists sought to intensify photography’s expressive potential through the use of soft-focus lenses, textured printing papers, and processes that allowed the surface of the print to be modified by hand. In many cases, photographers composed their pictures from two or more negatives. Other artists, swept up in the currents of mysticism that captivated bohemian circles around the turn of the twentieth century, relied on staging and multiple exposure to reconcile the camera’s clear-eyed factuality with the ethereal realm of myths, dreams, and visions.

Soft-focus lenses… Textured printing papers… And we thought Instagram is a new idea. The outcome is the same — the difference is that the effects that we now get with the tap of a filter button used to take a very long time to do and was, in fact, part of a rebellion against the masses who took up photography as a hobby. The essay Pictorialism in America goes into more detail on this:

As an army of weekend “snapshooters” invaded the photographic realm, a small but persistent group of photographers staked their medium’s claim to membership among the fine arts. They rejected the point-and-shoot approach to photography and embraced labor-intensive processes such as gum bichromate printing, which involved hand-coating artist papers with homemade emulsions and pigments, or they made platinum prints, which yielded rich, tonally subtle images. Such photographs emphasized the role of the photographer as craftsman and countered the argument that photography was an entirely mechanical medium.

I find it fascinating how history repeats itself all jumbled up sometimes. As photography became popular in the 1880s, “real photographers” turned to labor-intensive manual methods for adding filters and effects to their photos to show that they are artists and craftspeople. Now that it’s easy to add those effects, the “real photographers” are rebelling again. Here’s Jaap Grolleman in Why I hate Instagram and why you should too:

I can understand people are trying to be cute but just because it looks ‘vintage’ and ‘antique’ it doesn’t mean a picture of your cat is cool. Pictures of clear-blue skies, light poles, bus stations, office chairs and even paving stones, they all look ‘aaamaazing’. Suddenly it’s all fashionable and presumingly ‘artsy’. I often see good photos being ruined by this ridiculous filter. There’s nothing artsy about it. Applying Instagram’s filters is just ‘clever-clever’, a bad attempt to fake authenticity.

And here is Rebecca Greenfield in Rich Kids of Instagram Epitomize Everything Wrong with Instagram:

The very basis of Instagram is not just to show off, but to feign talent we don’t have, starting with the filters themselves. The reason we associate the look with “cool” in the first place is that many of these pretty hazes originated from processes coveted either for their artistic or unique merits, as photographer and blogger Ming Thein explains: “Originally, these styles were either conscious artistic decisions, or the consequences of not enough money and using expired film. They were chosen precisely because they looked unique-either because it was a difficult thing to execute well (using tilt-shift lenses, for instance) or because nobody else did it (cross-processing),” he writes. Instagram, however, has made such techniques easy and available, taking away that original value.

If history is indeed a sign of things to come, the obvious question is: how will professional photographers rebel against Instagram’s easy filter manipulation? Will they go back to historical techniques? Invent some new, more difficult ways to manipulate photos? Or perhaps (gasp!) just take a photo and not retouch it at all? My money is on the rebellion spurring on some new innovation in art photography, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.

Anyway, now that the tangent is out of the way, below are some of my favorite photos from the exhibition. You can view the full collection here. These photos were all manipulated in some physical way — usually part of a very painstaking process.

Untitled (technique: combination printing)

Cape Horn, Columbia River, Oregon (technique: wet plate negative process)

The Other Series (After Kertész) (technique: altering with bleach, dyes, and airbrush)

Étude de nuages, clair-obscur (technique: multiple printing)

17 Rio Pesaro, Venice (technique: cerulean wash)

Last night Cennydd Bowles tweeted something that really resonated with me:

Never ascribe to stupidity that which is adequately explained by complexity.

— Cennydd Bowles (@Cennydd) December 3, 2012

It reminded me of Erin Kissane’s contribution to the A List Apart article What I Learned About the Web in 2011:

If a single idea has followed me around this year, from politics to art and work to friendships, it’s been this one: “it’s more complicated than that.”

It’s centrally important to seek simplicity, and especially to avoid making things hard to use or understand. But if we want to make things that are usefully simple without being truncated or simplistic, we have to recognize and respect complexity—both in the design problems we address, and in the way we do our work.

I don’t know the flow of events that led Cennydd and Erin to their respective statements, but I know why it struck a chord with me. It feels like the number of tweets and blog posts that are written to ridicule and obliterate new products/apps/redesigns are on the rise. It’s like people don’t like anything any more — unless their friends made it. I think we can do better.

It’s easy to write a few paragraphs about how much something sucks. You know what’s difficult? Recognizing and respecting complexity. Giving people the benefit of the doubt and trying to understand why they made the decisions they made — whether it’s related to business, design, development, or anything else.

What’s really difficult is starting your argument from an assumption that other people are deliberate and thoughtful, and then working through each of your criticisms methodically. You’ll either realize that they made the right decisions, or arrive at the conclusion that they made some mistakes. Even if they did make mistakes — and we all have — by starting from a different baseline you’ll end up with a solid (and respectful) critique that the person can use to do things better.

For a creative person, the difference between reading “You suck!” and reading “Here’s where I think you made some wrong decisions” is the difference between being shamed into crawling under the covers and never putting their work out there ever again, and being encouraged to make their product better. We should always, always aim to do the latter.

I’m slowly making my way through Issue #3 of The Manual. If you haven’t read these books, I highly recommend it — they’re wonderful essay collections. This morning I read Practicing Passion by Tiffani Jones Brown, in which she dissects the whole idea of following your passion and doing what you love. She starts with this observation:

Sure, I’d been excited to start my own business. And sure, I’d loved the idea of writing for a living. Yet banal and frustrating tasks — the kind you approach with a groan, not a fist-pump — make up much of my job. So do I feel over-the-moon about my work? I truly like it. I feel good when I get better at it. Passion overstates the point.

She then goes on to recommend a more tempered approach to the passion thing:

Instead of asking “what will make me feel passion?” we should ask, “how can I make passion happen?” The answer is to cultivate a way of living and working that makes passion more likely. Passion takes practice.

But the point that really resonated with me is the part where she talks about flow:

You can get into flow doing almost any activity, no matter how good you are at it, no matter how mundane the task. Only two things are required: the activity has to have a clear goal and a challenge. You need to be really plugged in and focused; what you’re doing must stretch your body or mind. You won’t achieve flow while multitasking or surfing the internet but you might, odd as it seems, while doing a content audit or cleaning up comps.

Those are good words to remember. Sometimes we do what we want to do. The rest of the time we do what we need to do to get the job done and get better at what we do. Anyway, I guess the point is, buy The Manual. It’s such a treat.

I’ve really been enjoying Tim Kreider’s columns for the New York Times. His essay called The ‘Busy’ Trap got a lot of attention, and for good reason. His latest is called The Quiet Ones:

We’re a tribe, we quiet ones, we readers and thinkers and letter writers, we daydreamers and gazers out of windows. We are a civil people, courteous to excess, who disdain displays of anger as childish and embarrassing. But the Quiet Car is our territory, the last reservation to which we’ve been driven. And we can be pushed too far.

I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just link there quietly.

Giorgio Baresi wrote a long and very interesting post on how designers have an opportunity (and responsibility) to go beyond usability to build meaningful products that enrich people’s lives. From Designing Life-Changing Solutions :

The spread of widely available technology, such as sensors, smartphones, and high-speed mobile networks, puts us on top of a mountain of data and allows designers to tackle problems in ways that were unimaginable even a few years ago. By making sense of this abundance of data, designers are able to create life-changing products and services that help people achieve goals and objectives in relevant, meaningful, and actionable ways.  This ability moves design beyond the “A to B” scenario to embrace whole new solutions in which the starting point is known but the destination and the path to get there cannot be precisely defined upfront. Clear goals with clear paths have broadened, becoming as vague as “taking good care of yourself,” “living a healthy lifestyle,” or “managing your personal finances.”

This creates the opportunity for designers to work together with psychologists, as well as other subject matter experts, to better define how these broad challenges can be translated into meaningful products and services that are able to become true life companions.

Giorgio shares some great examples, as well as three design principles to help turn these goals into reality. It’s definitely worth making time for this one.

In December 2011 Twitter unveiled a new UI, along with updated iPhone, Android, and web clients. The response from tech circles was immediate and extremely negative. Twitter 4.0 for iPhone got slammed particularly hard. Here’s John Gruber with a pretty good representation of the views expressed by many:

Twitter 4.0 for iPhone lacks the surprise, delight, and attention to detail of a deserving successor to Tweetie, offering instead a least common denominator experience that no one deserves.

By the time Twitter 4.0 came out I was already using Tweetbot, but I updated and played around with the app anyway, as I’m sure many did. I had three main issues:

• Severely limited functionality. Some things I do all the time in Tweetbot are either impossible or very difficult to do in Twitter for iPhone. This includes easily switching accounts, adding/removing people from lists, seeing someone’s @-reply stream, and quickly getting to saved searches.
• Inability to interact with tweets in the main stream. You can’t click on a link or someone’s profile from the main Tweet stream. You have to tap through to the Tweet detail — in many ways an unnecessary tap. More on this later.
• The Discover tab. Like most complainers I assumed Discover was just a thinly veiled attempt to start shoving ads in our faces. Back in Twitter 4.0 this was just a list of seemingly random tweets, probably based on some global trending topics. There was always talk of customization, but the initial incarnation of Discover didn’t have much of that.

So, like many others, I joked about it on Twitter¹, and then moved back to Tweetbot without another thought.

Why didn’t they just come clean and call the “Discover” tab the “Monetization” tab? #NewNewTwitter

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) December 9, 2011

But that was not the end of the story. Slowly but surely, Twitter has been working on putting the pieces together of that consistent user experience they’ve been talking about for a long time.

The story unfolds

In June 2012, Twitter rolled out expanded Tweets, a way to see more information about a single Tweet (like an embedded photo or an article summary). They called the technology behind this feature Twitter Cards.

Then, in July, Twitter 4.3 for iPhone came out with support for expanded Tweets. This was followed by Twitter 5.0 in September, which included a redesigned iPad app (a topic for a different blog post, so let’s just leave that for now), as well as profile header images.

And then came Twitter 5.1 on November 16. It was a point release, sure, but I think this is the version that finally brings together two separate threads that Twitter has been working on for a while: Twitter Cards and the Discover tab. The release notes for Twitter 5.1 said this:

See what’s popular within your network on Discover.

— Tweets, tailored just for you, now appear right in the stream

— These Tweets show photo, video, and article previews so you can engage easily

This time something weird happened in my Twitter stream. I started seeing a few positive tweets about the new app. I even saw a few positive mentions about the Discover tab. Fred Wilson blogged about it just today.

I decided to take another look. I worked with Alex to implement Twitter cards on this site. I moved Tweetbot to another screen and committed to trying Twitter for iPhone as my primary app for a week. And now I think I finally see where Twitter is going with all of this. And that maybe we should have trusted them a year ago. Possibly even apologize to them. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up.

Information consumption on Twitter

When it comes to information consumption on Twitter, I think there are two overriding user needs:

• Get through as much content in as little time as possible.
• Know as quickly as possible if a link is worth clicking on.

The first requirement is technically difficult, but conceptually easy to meet. Just make the app as fast as it possibly can be. The second requirement is more difficult though. In the context of Twitter (specifically on mobile) there are two pieces of information that is important to decide if a link is worth clicking on:

• The source. This is easy to tell if you can see the URL, but since so many people still use URL-shorteners like bitly, the domain is often obscured, so you don’t know where the link is going to end up.
• A summary of the article. This is not easy to do in 120 characters², especially if the Tweet just says “This!! –> bitly.com/blahblah”.

Why not just click on a link to see if it’s worth reading? Well, because it messes with that speed principle. Loading a site takes time. Especially if you don’t know if the bitly link goes to Mashable and you then have to download a 2MB page with a gazillion HTTP requests. Clicking on a link is expensive, so you only want to do it if it’s worth it.

So this is where Twitter Cards come in. If someone tweets a link to sites that have implemented it, you can immediately see the source and a summary of the article to help you figure out if it’s really worth clicking through — even if a URL shortener is being used:

You also have to tap through to the tweet detail to click on the link; you can’t do it from the main stream. As I mentioned earlier, this extra tap used to annoy me, but I now think it’s a deliberate and important design decision. They are compromising immediate convenience for clarity of information. You might not agree with the decision, but it’s certainly not an oversight — I’m pretty sure it’s well thought through.

The implementation reminds me of the distinction between search results pages and product details pages on e-commerce sites. A search for “The Beatles” on Amazon doesn’t show you an “Add to cart” button on the search results page. You have to go to the product details page for that:

Twitter’s approach is similar. You have to view the summary before you can “commit”. The goal is to keep you inside the app until you’re absolutely sure you’re ready for the “purchase” — which in this case means clicking on a URL, emailing it to someone, sending it to Instapaper, etc. And now that the Discover tab is a much better customized version of photos and articles you might be interested in, the entire story is coming together really nicely.

There are still many features I miss in Twitter for iPhone. Having to poke around aimlessly for a while every time I’d like to see Tweets from a different list is probably the most frustrating issue at this point. But I have to say that Twitter Cards have made my experience so much more enjoyable and efficient that I’m going to stick with Twitter 5.1 for iPhone beyond my one-week experiment.

So what have we learned?

There are also some important product lessons to learn here. In his brilliant essay Subcompact Publishing Craig Mod sums it up nicely:

In product design, the simplest thought exercise is to make additions. It’s the easiest way to make an Old Thing feel like a New Thing. The more difficult exercise is to reconsider the product in the context of now. A now which may be very different from the then in which the product was originally conceived.

This is exactly what Twitter has done, starting with 4.0 almost a year ago. It was a gutsy move to rethink the entire experience — one they got a lot of ridicule for. And I’m sure the design team felt like this quite often:

(Source: The Oatmeal)

But to their credit, they stuck to their guns. They knew where they were going, and instead of surrendering to the extremely vocal complainers, they kept their eyes on the vision and went for it. That’s good product management. And now, almost a year later, I think they are finally seeing the tide turning as we’re getting a better sense of the end game.³

So, uh, I believe an apology is in order. I’m sorry, Twitter. I see where you’re going with this. And I like it.

A few weeks ago the Internet went nuts about a blog post by Dustin Curtis called The Best, in which he argued that it’s important to spend the time (and money) to find and purchase the absolute best of everything. The money quote:

If you’re an unreasonable person, trust me: the time it takes to find the best of something is completely worth it. It’s better to have a few fantastic things designed for you than to have many untrustworthy things poorly designed to please everyone.

The post got linked to by most of the sites I read, and I must have seen about 20 tweets about it in my stream.

I get the sentiment of going for the best, unwavering quality, and all that, but the post just didn’t sit right with me. I was going to write a response to it, but so far all I’ve been able to come up with is this montage from Arrested Development:

But yesterday, Moxie Marlinspike wrote a response that gets pretty close to the issues with Dustin’s philosophy. The Worst unfortunately steps into personal attacks, which is a real shame, because his argument is pretty solid, and would have been stronger without the snark. Anyway, the core of his message is this:

Hacker News could possibly be drawn to Dustin Curtis’ cutlery because it’s reminiscent of “simplify.” The makers of the cutlery took the concept to its core essentials, and nominally perfected them. But to me, “simplify” is about removing clutter — about de-emphasizing the things that are unimportant so that it’s easy to focus on the things that are. We shouldn’t be putting any emphasis on the things in our life, we should be trying to make them as insignificant as possible, so that we can focus on what’s important.

In a sense, the best gives a nod to this by suggesting that getting the very best of everything will somehow make those things invisible to us. That if we can blindly trust them, we won’t have to think about them. But the worst counters that if we’d like to de-emphasize things that we don’t want to be the focus of our life, we probably shouldn’t start by obsessing over them. That we don’t simplify by getting the very best of everything, we simplify by arranging our lives so that those things don’t matter one way or the other.

Of course, the right answer is most likely somewhere in the middle. To seek out quality without letting things own us. But it’s good for the Internet’s equilibrium to hear the complete opposite of Dustin’s argument.

For another perspective, consider Charles Faraone’s answer on Quora to the question What’s your favourite parable? Charles tells the story of a university professor who gave his students a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups to choose from — some plain, others expensive and exquisite. Once all the students have chosen their cups, and only the plain and cheap ones were left behind, the professor commented:

While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.

Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups. And then you began eyeing each other’s cups.

Now consider this: Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of life we live.

Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee. Savor the coffee, not the cups!

In other words, make the best coffee you can, and don’t worry about what you drink it in.

Read The Best, The Worst, and What’s your favourite parable?