Christopher Butler wrote a good post on the relationship between Ego and Design, and how to structure design feedback better. It’s called Your Ego Is a Bad Designer, and he starts by explaining why development projects usually begin to go wrong during the design phase:

Design—specifically, when we start making visual decisions—is the first point in a project when we begin to engage one another in emotionally vulnerable ways. Every point in the process is an opportunity to second guess who is in control? and how do I feel about that? but design lacks the social decorum of sales negotiations and the regimentation of information architecture planning that would otherwise provide some structure for handling these potential conflicts. There’s simply no way to anticipate how the client will feel upon seeing that first mockup, or how you will respond, designer, to that initial deluge of feedback.

He then shares his approach to sharing work with clients, and structuring their feedback in a positive and helpful way. I also like the way he makes us as designers responsible for the success of a project:

We don’t fail at design because we lack tools, time, money, or the right clients. We fail at design because we lack insight. We don’t fail at design, we fail our design.

For more on design critiques, see these three great posts:

• Do you want critique, or a hug? How to gain valuable criticism on your design
• Moving from Critical Review to Critique
• Giving Better Design Feedback

Oliver Reichenstein takes on the tendency to put social media sharing buttons all over a site in Sweep the Sleaze. This part in particular is something I’ve thought about as well:

If readers are too lazy to copy and paste the URL, and write a few words about your content, then it is not because you lack these magical buttons. If you provide excellent content, social media users will take the time to read and talk about it in their networks. That’s what you really want. You don’t want a cheap thumbs up, you want your readers to talk about your content with their own voice.

By the way, in case you haven’t seen it — Oliver’s team just did a gorgeous redesign of their iA site. Be sure to check out his post Responsive Typography, which goes into some of the details.

I’ve collected quite a few articles about Facebook in the period immediately preceding and following the IPO, so I thought I’d share them all in a single post. These are not primarily about the IPO and the issues surrounding that process. It’s a collection of interesting (and sometimes controversial) viewpoints about where Facebook is headed, and what that means for the wider web. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but it’s always good to look at a variety of perspectives and then find a version of the story that you feel comfortable with.

The articles are listed in chronological order, starting with the oldest. Enjoy!

The economics of digital sharecropping:

Because Facebook’s content is created by its members, ARPU (Average Revenue Per Users) also tells us the monetary value of each member’s labor. If the average Facebook sharecropper were to be paid a revenue share for his or her work on the site, that member would make a buck and change every three months – about enough for one crappy cup of coffee. Needless to say, the amount is so small that Facebook members never think about it. The amounts only become economically interesting when, as I wrote earlier, you aggregate them on a massive scale.

I would argue, in fact, that while Facebook very much wants ARPU to grow steadily, it probably doesn’t want the number to get so large that it becomes a meaningful amount to its members. If that happened, members might start thinking about the cash value of their labor rather than just its attention value.

Back Off, Mark Zuckerberg!:

An appreciably abashed John Smith struggled to figure out how his reading habits had become public knowledge. After clicking on the Kardashian headline, he hadn’t clicked a Facebook ‘recommend’ button or anything. So why were all his Facebook friends being informed that while perusing the Huffington Post he’d surrendered to primordial yearnings?

Because at some point over the past year he had clicked a button without reading the fine print and thus had entered the world of “frictionless sharing.” In this world, if you’re on a website that permits frictionless sharing, every time you click on a headline, the site can report this behavior to your Facebook friends.

Facebook’s business model:

The good news for Facebook is there is a lot of room to target ads more effectively and put ads in more places. The bad news is that, if there is one consistent theme in both online and offline advertising, it’s that ads work dramatically better when consumers have purchasing intent. Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand ““ they simply harvest it. When people use Facebook, they are generally socializing with friends. You can put billboards all over a park, and maybe sometimes you’ll happen to convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. But you end up with a cluttered park, and not very effective advertising.

Facebook vs. Twitter:

In the long run, people will trust Twitter more than they do Facebook. And when it comes to building a long-term, trusting relationship with its users, Twitter will take it slowly and steadily, and in doing so, could win the race.

How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked the Valley:

Zuckerberg and his crew have made a series of high-risk moves – five hacks that have changed Silicon Valley forever “” that were far more daring than wearing a hoodie to an IPO roadshow.

The Facebook Fallacy:

I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.

Facebook, however, has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn’t advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits.

After Facebook fails:

The distance between what tracking does and what users want, expect and intend is so extreme that backlash is inevitable. The only question is how much it will damage a business that is vulnerable in the first place.

There’s a Zucker Born Every Minute:

While playing on the audienc’s desire to get rich quick has often been enough to launch a tech stock into the stratosphere, it doesn’t seem to have been enough to help Facebook reach escape velocity. Why is that? Well, from a story perspective, we believe it’s because of an inherent dissonance between the gold rush mentality and the meaning of the brand.

Facebook was trying to tell both stories at the same time. The social network is about community and connectedness, while the public stock offering was all about getting rich quick. Of course, every successful brand has a human story and a money story living side by side. The question is, do the two stories complement each other in some interesting way, or do they cancel each other out?

I like this mental image of the “product in search of a solution” phenomenon we see so much of of these days:

Your organization invents something no one else does. The rest of the process goes like this: I have this tail. I put it on the donkey. I spend money testing and fixing the tail to get it closer to what the donkey wants it to do. I also spend money on marketing and sales people to convince the donkey I have what it needs.

There is, of course, a better way.

Nishant Kothary takes a passage from a Jay-Z book and turns it into a great commentary on grid-based design in Rap it in a Grid:

The reality is, a grid makes the act of solving design problems seem predictable, but says nothing for supplying the appropriate design solution. The grid is akin to the beat. But it’s hardly ever the flow, which is the true design solution.

I came across Piotr Czerski’s essay We, the Web Kids through a great collection of quotes on James Bridle’s site. It’s the kind of essay that I think everyone who does anything on the Internet should read. It’s a pitch-perfect collection of thoughts on what it means to live here, now, on the Internet. For example:

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not “˜surf’ and the internet to us is not a “˜plac’ or “˜virtual spac’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

His views on the idea that we don’t want to pay for things are also spot-on:

This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist, but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever.

I know I probably say this too much, but this is a must-read.

Jon Kolko goes on an full-scale assault against online advertising in a post for the Austin Center for Design called Advertising Is The Problem. I am no fan of the advertising model myself, but Jon paints a post-apocolyptically grim picture of what’s to come:

I’ve seen the future, and it’s awful. It’s The Shallows: In the future, you’ll only see the things that are most likely to get you to buy. Everywhere. All the time. It’s an internet of consumption, based on an algorithmic profile of everything you’ve done, and it’s constantly selling, selling, selling. It’s pervading into real life, through targeted and adaptable advertising on digital billboards, physical computing, mobility solutions, kiosks, digital product placement, taxi flat screens, in-flight entertainment, and on, and on. Ther’s no conversation. It’s not engaging. It’s consumptive. It’s mindless. And it’s happening all around us.

I am (slightly) less bleak on this topic — I think there is enough evidence of content creators selling their goods directly to their readers/listeners/viewers that we’ll start seeing a slow but steady shift away from traditional online advertising. See Chris Wolff’s The Facebook Fallacy for some commentary on that point, as well as a follow-up from Doc Searls called After Facebook fails, where he makes this statement against the traditional advertising model:

The simple fact is that we need to start equipping buyers with their own tools for connecting with sellers, and for engaging in respectful and productive ways. That is, to improve the ability of demand to drive supply, and not to constantly goose up supply to drive demand, and failing 99.x% of the time.

Ironically, Doc is one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which Jon Kolko uses to set up his own post.

Anyway, I think viewpoints like Jon’s are important — whether we agree with them or not. They force us to think about how we spend our time, and how we can contribute to preventing those negative visions of the future from occurring.

I’ve never fully bought into the “user experience cannot be designed” argument. You could say I’m biased because user experience design is how I choose to make my living, but I would (surprise!) disagree with that as well. Consider this paragraph from Chris Dixon’s excellent post The experience economy:

Experiences make people happier than products (a fact that scientific studies support). The popularity of experiences like music concerts has skyrocketed compared to corresponding products like music recordings. Apple, the most valuable company in the world, maniacally focuses on product experiences, down to minute details like the experience of unboxing an iPhone. Customers want to know where their food and clothes come from, so they can understand the experiences surrounding them. The emphasis on experiences also helps explain other large trends like the migration to cities. Cities have always offered the trade-off of fewer goods and less space in exchange for better experiences.

The main argument against experience design is that we can’t control context of use, no matter how hard we try. But the above examples are all cases where we can control enough of the context of use to make a reasonable assumption about the type of experience the majority of users will have. The same goes for web sites — through creativity and a little user testing, we can get to a similar level of comfort with how most users will experience our sites/apps.

So, don’t give up, experience designers. We can build great experiences for our users (while also meeting business goals at the same time).