I got an interesting email from Surat Lozowick about my post on coffee houses and creativity. He pointed me to a piece he wrote called Working at the coffee shop: the right environment and the right distractions — a very interesting post that concludes with a great perspective on the issue:

Creativity does not exist in a vacuum; experiences, conversations, reading, writing, the constraints of time and the distractions of life are just as important as quiet moments of focus. And conveniently, the coffee shop is there to provide them.

He also links to Conor Friedersdorf’s Working Best at Coffee Shops, in which Conor presents four possible theories to answer the question, “Why are many telecommuters most efficient in noisy public places with lots of distractions?” It’s worth a read not just for his theories, but also for this goose bump-inducing Ernest Hemingway quote:

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.

It annoys and inspires me in equal parts when I see language like that — simple and elegant, yet dripping with meaning and emotion. So jealous.

Sam Grobart is not a UI designer — he’s a technology blogger for the New York Times. And in Good Features Demand Good Design he succinctly articulates one of the most difficult aspects of our jobs, and one of the cornerstones of Information Architecture:

But all the features in the world don’t mean a thing if you can’t present them in a welcoming, intuitive way. Take a look at that Smart TV interface: there are 26 places you can go, and that’s before you scroll to another page. The tangled mess of cables behind my TV may have disappeared, but ther’s a new source of confusion right on my screen. [“¦]

I’m no user-interface expert, but it would seem to me that you want to present viewers with a few, limited supercategories “” not everything all at once.

The day of the Information Architect might be over, but Information Architecture is alive and well.

I do most of my online reading through RSS, and I don’t think I’m alone. For the most part this is a good reading experience, but there are a few things publishers can do to make it even better. So if you publish a blog, here are three proposed guidelines for RSS feeds:

1. Have an RSS feed and make it easy to subscribe. Contrary to popular belief, Twitter did not kill RSS. It’s alive and well. So please don’t bury or hide the feed — it should be easy to find the link and subscribe. Also, do some work on your feed – use a service like Feedburner to customize it (and give you analytics on your subscribers).
2. Unless it’s central to your revenue model, don’t provide article excerpts only. I understand that there are subscription sites that require payment to get access to full RSS feeds — that’s a conscious business decision, so if it works, great! But for the rest of us, RSS excerpts are a bad idea. It places the burden on anyone following your shared items to click through to see the article, and that slows people down. As a general rule (with the above stated exception), please provide a full feed – you’ll grow your audience and eventually get those click-throughs because of it.
3. Remove the metadata from your feed URLs. If I do click through to an article to comment, share it on Twitter, etc., a URL like this looks bad and makes sharing harder to track: http://uxmag.com/design/debating-the-fundamentals?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+UXM
   +%28UX+Magazine%29.

   The stuff after the “?” is added by Feedburner so you can get detailed analytics on item link clicks. But unless you really want to see where your RSS feed clicks come from you don’t need this level of detail. All you need to know is the number of Item Views in your feed — the rest of your analytics can come from Google Analytics. It’s very easy to turn this tracking off to remove the metadata and make your URLs more friendly. In Feedburner, go to “Configure Stats” and uncheck the “Item link clicks” box. Here’s a screen shot:

In Luke Wroblewski’s new project Future Friendly, they discuss their thinking around universal content:

Well-structured content is now an essential part of art direction. Consider how it can flow into a variety of containers by being mindful of their constraints and capabilities. Be bold and explore new possibilities but know the future is likely to head in many directions.

If you publish content on the web it’s not future friendly to ignore and/or limit its use in RSS, which is one of the most important containers we have at our disposal.

Scott Berkun in The idiot theory of news:

Non-news, news without context, is easy to generate. It takes less skill as a journalist to write these stories. Often these stories are more popular than better written stories about important things. The popular news is not the best news. The popular anything is rarely the best anything. The way we see the world is shaped by what sells best as news, rather than what will give us a realistic perspective on the world and our place in it.

(link via @iamFinch)

In The distractions of social media, 1673 style Tom Standage provides an excerpt from his upcoming book “Cicero’s Web”. He points out that public officials and university authorities were very much against coffee houses, because they kept people from doing real work. According to one critic in the 1600s:

And the scholars are so greedy after news (which is none of their business) that they neglect all for it, and it is become very rare for any of them to go directly to his chamber after prayers without first doing his suit at the coffee-house, which is a vast loss of time grown out of a pure novelty. For who can apply close to a subject with his head full of the din of a coffee-house?

It’s that last sentence that I find particularly amusing. For who can apply close to a subject with his head full of the din of a coffee-house? It is precisely in the din (“A loud, unpleasant, and prolonged noise”) of coffee houses that I find I do my best work. In fact, coffee houses have a long history of being spaces where creativity tends to thrive. For example, in Claudia Roden’s Coffee, she notes:

Catering equally for the working and the leisured classes, [coffee houses] have tended to be democratic in character. As a French periodical of the 1850s entitled Le Café pointed out in its slogan: “The salon stood for privilege, the café stands for equality.” Coffee has been called the intellectual drink of democracy. In times of upheaval, coffee houses became revolutionary centers, encouraging the interchange of ideas and usually generating liberal and radical opinion. It has been said that the French Revolution was fomented in coffee-house meetings, and the Café Foy was the starting point of its mob spirit.

Coffee houses have been linked to intellectual activities for a long time:

The French coffee shop ennobled the ways of its frequenters by inaugurating a reign of temperance and luring people away from the cabaret. Today the institution is still one where everything is discussed and where people sharpen their wits in debate.

The influence of coffee houses was enormous on the political, social, literary, and commercial life of the times. They were the stage for political debate, fringe centers of education and the origin of certain newspapers. Insurance houses, merchant banks, and the stock exchange began in coffee houses.

There is just something about coffee shops that helps me focus. It’s the ambient noise. It’s the knowledge that I’m not alone, that there are people around me whose diverse lives are happening in the background. It’s the constant, nagging thought that some of those people might be the audience for what I’m making. It’s like working inside a contextual inquiry all the time.

Also, coffee is pretty great.

I’m linking to Sam Biddle’s Does Google Have Any Social Skills at All? with some caveats. I’m not a fan of headlines like that (here’s why), and there are way too many hyperbolic, trolling statements like “Nobody really uses Google+”. Still, the article makes some good points about Google’s lack of understanding of their users:

The keynote sounded one futuristic clarion call after another: Glass, the wearable computer; Google Now, a smartphone system that provides intricately tailored life information; the Nexus Q, a social media streamer; and a fancy new way to throw parties with Google+. But underneath each of these feats of technology you could see a hollow, lurching weirdness that makes you wonder: Who will use any of this stuff besides the actors in Google’s promo videos? [“¦]

In each case, Google has balanced on golden fingers a product — clearly with a lot of time, thought, and money behind it — that just doesn’t seem to jibe with the way we actually live our lives. There isn’t any lack of effort or innovation here, but rather a gaping disconnect between the way data geeks and the rest of us see the world.

I know Google does a lot of user research on their flagship products, but it doesn’t look like they do any Product Discovery or user need analysis on these new products. Maybe they’re genius designers, so they don’t need to do research. Or maybe not.

Tim Kreider in The ‘Busy’ Trap:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. [“¦] More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

Trust me. You need to read this article.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on the data mining of e-book reading habits. In Your E-Book Is Reading You they discuss, for example, what Barnes & Noble has learned from Nook data:

Barnes & Noble has determined, through analyzing Nook data, that nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts, while novels are generally read straight through, and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier. Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start. Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend skip around between books.

The article goes on to discuss how publishers are now using this kind of data to guide everything from the subject matter to the length of future publications. The whole thing makes me a little uncomfortable — I think I agree with Mr. Galassi here:

Others worry that a data-driven approach could hinder the kinds of creative risks that produce great literature. “The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn’t have anything to do with,” says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “We’re not going to shorten ‘War and Peace’ because someone didn’t finish it.”

I realize there is a hint of hypocrisy in my feelings about data-driven book publishing. As a practitioner of user-centered design I am a big proponent of data-driven decisions (this presentation by Joshua Porter is a constant companion). But this feels different. I guess I’m worried that publishing books with the explicit purpose of satisfying some imaginary, averaged-out reader drone will pull us all towards a safe middle ground where no risk is allowed.

In my version of a nightmare scenario, my 2-year old daughter will be awash in Dora the Explorer books with no access to dangerous, crazy stories like Oh, The Places You’ll Go or Where The Wild Things Are. I don’t think a data-driven approach to publishing would have let those books see the light, and that would have been a tragedy.

Here’s to writers who take risks.