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).

John Moltz is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers with his very nice web site. And he just wrote a thing about Windows 8 for Macworld where he really outdid himself. It’s hard to pick just one section to quote, so please, just go read Coming Attractions: Windows 8. A small taste:

Microsoft has declared Windows 8 a tablet operating system “without compromises” because it runs on tablets and desktops and toaster-fridges and can run desktop applications on any Intel-based hardware. Surely any operating system that has a matrix to let you know what features are available in which version can’t be compromised, right?

But running Windows 8, it often seems that what’s been compromised is your sanity.

I have such a weakness for snarky tech reporting.

(via The Loop)

Seth Godin sums up the dilemma of the digital age quite nicely in Dancing on the edge of finished:

Facing a sea of infinity, it’s easy to despair, sure that you will never reach dry land, never have the sense of accomplishment of saying, “I’m done.” At the same time, to be finished, done, complete—this is a bit like being dead. The silence and the feeling that maybe that’s all.

Happy weekend, everybody!

I was encouraged to read these words by Matt Mullenweg in his post Radically Simplified WordPress:

As John Borthwick put beautifully today, “A tablet is an incredible device that you can put in front of babies or 95-year-olds and they know how to use it.” How we democratize publishing on that sort of platform will not and should not work like WordPress’ current dashboard does. It’s not a matter of a responsive stylesheet or incremental UX improvements, it’s re-imagining and radically simplifying what we currently do, thinking outside the box of wp-admin.

This is great news, and I’d like to offer my 2 cents on what an ideal mobile WordPress platform might look like. Because despite several attempts I haven’t been able to figure out a good workflow for publishing to WordPress from my iPhone or iPad.

Let’s take this post as an example. I read Matt’s article in Instapaper. I used the awesome “Create Note in Simplenote” feature to send the above quote to my preferred writing app. I am writing these words in Simplenote for iOS using Markdown. Writing down the words is a breeze; geting those words to my blog is a mission (and usually results in a big time delay). I’m going to wait until I get home, open my laptop, and wait for nvALT to sync with the text I entered into Simplenote. Then I’ll copy the Markdown into MarsEdit, add some URL and keyword specifics, and hit Publish.

The WordPress iOS apps are not helpful to me, because they don’t allow you to add custom fields and URLs. For example, for link posts I have a custom field that turns the title of the RSS entry for that post into a link that takes the reader directly to the original article. I can’t do that in the iOS app.

But here’s the thing – I don’t want a better WordPress iOS app. I don’t even want a mobile-optimized WordPress Dashboard. Instead, I want all the apps I already use to integrate seamlessly with the WordPress backend. So my ideal mobile WordPress experience is this: make it dead easy for text editor apps to publish to WordPress.

Once I’m done writing this post in Simplenote I would like to tap a link that says “Publish to WordPress.” I would then like to see a customizable dialog that lets me add/edit all the fields I have chosen to include, hit Post, and be done. It could work similar to Tumblr integration on Instapaper, except with customizable fields:

Maybe this is already what the WordPress team is thinking about – I certainly hope so. Either way, I know that this kind of seamless integration would truly free us to publish from anywhere, and will put a final nail in the coffin of the “iPad is only for consuming” argument.

It would be great to get more insight from the WordPress team on what they’re working on for mobile.