I know I shouldn’t write meta-posts. I really enjoy reading such posts by the writers I follow, but for some reason it feels presumptuous of me to do the same. But hey, it’s the end of the year and no one is reading anything anyway. So I thought I’d let you know about two things that have been on my mind about my writing here.

Disagreeing

I enjoy arguing. But I mean that not in the way most of the Internet means it. I mean it in the way the Dictionary means it:

Give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea, action, or theory, typically with the aim of persuading others to share on’s view.

I don’t just enjoy writing such arguments, I also enjoy reading them - particularly if someone is making an argument against one of my opinions. But I really dislike mean-spirited fights online, so much so that I’ve had to close comments on a couple of posts this year because things just got too rowdy.

After particularly contentious fighting in the comments section of a post I usually vow to stick to writing non-controversial stuff, but before I know it I’m back to arguing (again, in the sense of “giving reasons in support of an idea”). I finally realized that I should just run with that instinct and not try to censor myself. But from here on out I’m going to set very specific rules for myself on how I’m allowed to argue. And for that I turn to Paul Graham.

In his brilliant post How to Disagree, Paul goes through what he calls the “Disagreement Hierarchy”, or “DH”. I’m not going to restate what he said - you should definitely click through and read that post. I’ll just say that my commitment to myself (and to you) is that I will always argue/disagree at levels DH5 or DH6 of the Disagreement Hierarchy. As Paul says, it results in better arguments and happier people:

But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier. If you study conversations, you find there is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6. You don’t have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don’t want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.

Arguing (yes, in the Dictionary sense of the word) is important because we all learn from it. But we have to rise above name-calling (DH1) and skip all the other levels to a point where we do the hard work and disagree in a way that moves the conversation forward. That’s what I hope to do here.

Comments

Oh, comments. I’ve gone back and forth on this so many times. Sometimes I leave comments open, other times I close them. Sometimes I close comments on a post, get called out on Twitter about it, and then open it up again. It’s confusing and it’s causing me headaches. So I’ve made a decision to close comments on all posts, at least for a month or so, or until someone writes a convincing argument on why sites should have comments (please use DH5 or DH6 in your argument).

To me, the most convincing argument yet to not having comments is Matt Gemmel’s post Comments Off. I can’t say it better than he did, so please go read his thoughts on the issue. For me, the biggest reason is what Matt calls the burden of moderation. It takes a really long time to moderate comments, especially if a post gets popular while I’m sleeping and I wake up to 40 comments that I have to read through to make sure no one called someone else an idiot. As Anil Dash said, if your website is full of assholes, it’s your fault, so moderating comments is not something you can just ignore. It has to be done.

I’ve had to get up at 5am way too many times to spend an hour deleting comments and asking people to be nice to each other. That’s time I could have spent (1) sleeping, or more importantly, (2) writing something new. So I’m going to give the no comments thing a go and see what happens.

As Matt says in his post, this doesn’t mean I don’t want feedback. We’ve already established that I enjoy arguing, so I also enjoy reading peopl’s counter-arguments (or support, of course). So like Matt, I also hope to get the following types of feedback:

• A tweet to let me know if you agree/disagree and why.
• A post on your own site using DH5 or DH6 to agree/disagree with something I said.
• An email if you don’t want to say anything publicly.

I will link to responses that are DH5+ and add to the conversation (even if it makes me look stupid for writing something). I’m not turning off comments to discourage engagement disagreement, I’m turning it off to help me sleep better and give me more time for writing (this is a side project, so I need all the extra time I can get).

2012

So those are some of my thoughts about what you might see here in 2012. For bonus points, go read this excellent post on how to make a better Internet, and what to do about things that annoy you. For me, lesson #9 will probably become my writing goal this year:

Stop reading bad writing. Keep writing good writing.

I’m not there yet, but I do enjoy trying. Thanks for coming with me.

I don’t like anonymous sources, but this post by “a former CTO [who] was briefed on Facebook’s advertising strategy” caught a lot of people’s attention last week. This paragraph, in particular, stands out:

What most users don’t know is that the new features being introduced are all centered around increasing the value of Facebook to advertisers, to the point where Facebook representatives have been selling the idea that Timeline is actually about re-conceptualizing users around their consumer preferences, or as they put it, “brands are now an essential part of people’s identities.”

Brent Simmons had a very succinct response to that last quote:

Pukin’

I agree.

John Gruber then linked to a page that Facebook set up to explain how they make money. Facebook says that it now costs over a billion dollars a year to keep the site running. That’s a lot of money, for sure. But it’s a damn shame that advertising appears to be the only viable way for Facebook to foot that bill.

Facebook says that they have over 800 million active users, and that “more than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day.” So let’s, for argument’s sake, say that about 500 million users visit Facebook every day. If each of those users paid Facebook $2 per year, the revenue would cover the cost of running the site. Just increase that to $3 per year, or 25c per month, and you suddenly have $1.5B revenue per year (or roughly $500M profit, based on Facebook’s rough estimate of their operating costs). Let’s be clear about this: it’s the cost of one coffee per year.

Yes, of course this is naive - it would never happen. Most people aren’t willing to pay for services or content on the Internet. There is an expectation that everything should be free, and that at the same time, companies should respect our privacy and keep The Brands™ away from our personal information. It’s not a realistic expectation - something’s gotta give if no one is willing to pay for anything. But most people don’t think about it long enough to realize that.

A recent article on the Pinboard blog really resonated with me, and by the way it spread on Twitter I know it struck a chord with a lot of others too. From Don’t be a free user:

What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

In Facebook’s case that “number greater than zero” is $3 per year (have I mentioned that it’s per year!?). But the non-geek world just don’t think about these things. They don’t think about designers and developers who create apps and need to be compensated for it to keep a service alive. They feel that 99c is too much to pay for an iOS game. They freak out every time Facebook moves some things around, still blissfully unaware that they are not Facebook’s customers, they’re just the product being sold to advertisers. All they want is their free Facebook so they can “inbox” their friends about tomorrow’s party. “Pay for this thing?”, they say. “Screw that - it’s not my problem how you keep the site up. Oh, by the way, just remember that you have to respect my privacy and you can’t show me any advertising.”

It’s terribly frustrating.

I fear we’ve painted ourselves into this free corner, and the only way out is to sell our identities to The Brands™. Steve Jobs alluded to this in his negotiations with the New York Times when he refused to give them access to user information Apple collects in the App store. From his biography:

If you don’t like it, don’t use us. I’m not the one who got you in this jam. You’re the ones who’ve spent the past five years giving away your paper online and not collecting anyone’s credit card information.

We created this culture. We’re the ones who have been giving stuff away for free for the past decade, not collecting anyone’s credit card information. We’ve conditioned users that everything should be free, always. This gives advertisers the upper hand in any negotiation, because they know that their way is the only way that most sites can make money.

Why is this such a big deal? Relevant, contextual advertising isn’t bad, right? Not in moderation, no (see The Deck). But when ads become the only way out and advertisers are the ones calling the shots, users suffer. Also, as a matter of principle I firmly believe that it’s better to pay the makers of things directly than through some convoluted ad system.

We can’t really blame Facebook for choosing this path of least resistance. It’s the hand they were dealt by the culture we’ve created. But I remain hopeful that new services will charge for what they do so that we can slowly begin to define our own identities without The Brands™ trying to tell us who we are.

When I saw this image on Comical Concept I first found it funny. And then I realized how scarily true it is. It reminded me of a couple of paragraphs from Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together:

But online, you’re slim, rich, and buffed up, and you feel you have more opportunities than in the real world. So, here, too, better than nothing can become better than something - or better than anything. Not surprisingly, people report feeling let down when they move from the virtual to the real world. It is not uncommon to see people fidget with their smartphones, looking for virtual places where they might once again be more.

It is not unusual for people to feel more comfortable in an unreal place than a real one because they feel that in simulation they show their better and perhaps truer self. With all of this going on, who will hold a brief for the real?

As a constant user myself, it would be hypocritical of me to go on a rant against social media. But I do worry about how this story plays out. What happens when we get so attached to the online places where we “might once again be more” that we get tired of being with the people around us?

David Eaves wrote a great review of Clay Johnson’s new book The Information Diet:

With information, our problem isn’t that we consume too much. What’s dangerous is consuming an overabundance of junk information - information that is bad for us. Today, one can choose to live strictly on a diet of ramen noodles and Mars bars. Similarly, it’s never been easier to restrict one’s information consumption to that which confirms our biases.

In an effort to better serve us, everywhere we go, we can chomp on a steady diet of information that affirms and comforts rather than challenges - information devoid of knowledge or even accuracy; cheaply developed stories by “big info” content farms like Demand Media or cheaply created opinion hawked by affirmation factories like MSNBC or FOX News; even emails and tweets that provide dopamine bursts but little value.

In small quantities, these information sources can be good and even enjoyable. In large quantities, they deplete our efficiency, stress us out, and can put us in reality bubbles.

It looks like a considered, non-alarmist analysis of the problem, with some good practical advice on how to address it. I just bought it - here’s the Amazon link if you’d like to do the same.

The Monster Engine is one of those projects that make me love the Internet for its ability to expose amazing creative talent to a worldwide audience. Illustrator Dave DeVries started with a simple question: What would a child’s drawing look like if it were painted realistically? In his own words:

It began at the Jersey Shore in 1998, where my niece Jessica often filled my sketchbook with doodles. While I stared at them, I wondered if color, texture and shading could be applied for a 3D effect. As a painter, I made cartoons look three dimensional every day for the likes of Marvel and DC comics, so why couldn’t I apply those same techniques to a kid’s drawing? That was it… no research, no years of toil, just the curiosity of seeing Jessica’s drawings come to life.

The Monster Engine is the 48-page outcome from that curiosity, and it looks wonderful. He describes the process as follows:

I project a child’s drawing with an opaque projector, faithfully tracing each line. Applying a combination of logic and instinct, I then paint the image as realistically as I can.

Below are some of my favorite illustrations from the project. Be sure to check out the whole gallery.

Buy “The Monster Engine” on Amazon.

I’ve written about Dhanji R. Prasanna excellent post on Google Wave and working at big companies before, but I wanted to come back to something he said that I just can’t get out of my head. In one section he talks about a topic I care about very much - what motivates people to do great work. I really like his perspective on the importance of incremental progress:

[As] a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria.

I like the analogy of these small wins as Deus Ex Machina:

[It means] “God out of the machine”; a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.

It’s so important for large teams to celebrate those wins with the people they work with every day - and to call out the “characters” responsible for accomplishing Deus Ex Machina. It is hard to get that right in large organizations because the invisibility of individual team members and the pressures to move on to The Next Thing aren’t naturally conducive to this type of behavior. But it’s possible if you work at it.

Whether you keep some champagne in a fridge, send out company-wide emails thanking people personally, or ring a bell every time code gets deployed (ok, that last one is lame, sorry), being in a large organization isn’t an excuse for acting like a faceless corporation.

John D. Cook writes some scary true words in Productivity and negative space:

People who fracture their time putting out fires seem more productive, or at least more responsive, than the people who block out time to think. It’s harder to notice someone not being frantic. Thinkers don’t fare well in environments that reward activity more than accomplishment.

This is such a huge problem in big corporations today. People who are running from meeting to meeting are perceived to be more productive than those who sit at their desks working all day[1]. And the problem is worse for programmers - very few managers understand what they do, so it’s hard for them to stomach days and days of solid coding without seeing something “tangible” (in their view).

It all comes back the difference between Makers and Managers, and how the Makers should be evaluated on completely different criteria than the Managers. Criteria that reward the quality of what they make, not the number of status updates they give.

(link via Graham Poulter)

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1. I’m not saying that people who have a lot of meetings are necessarily less productive, just that those who are not in meetings are “out of sight, out of mind”, and therefore not seen as particularly productive.  â†©

I love pretty much everything Frank Chimero writes, and his essay on the meaning of design from a few weeks back still rings in my ears:

We should care more about our craft because w’re granted an opportunity to contribute to the world. We should care more about what we say because each time we speak, ther’s someone there to listen. We should care more about our audiences because they are the ones who give our work value. We might think that design work is about you or about me or anyone else who makes it, or maybe about the things that we make and the artifacts we produce, but don’t let this way of thinking fool you. The things we make are all just excuses to speak with one another and to help one another. We are all linked, and the things that we make for each other strengthen the invisible threads that tie us all together.

Many people won’t agree with this sentiment. Many will think it’s silly to think about something as trivial as web design in this grandiose way. They’ll remind us that we’re just making web sites, not saving the world. And that’s fine - not everyone is going to care as much about design, or even understand why some of us do.

But I do care. I care because I think we have the opportunity to shape a technology that is at once exhilarating and dangerous. A technology that has the massive opportunity to bring people closer together, if we can just keep it together long enough not to destroy each other in YouTube comments and flaming blog posts.

So, yes, I care a lot about this, probably more than I should. But I’m with Frank on this: everything we do is just an excuse “to speak with one another and to help one another.”

I’m still slowly making my way through Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, and this quote really jumped out at me this morning:

We have to love our technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology’s true effects on us. These amended narratives are a kind of realtechnik. The realtechnik of connectivity culture is about possibilities and fulfillment, but it also about the problems and dislocations of the tethered self. Technology helps us manage life stresses but generates anxieties of its own. The two are often closely linked.

It seems like everyone was looking for developers at this year’s Tech4Africa conference. We heard some fantastic startup ideas, and each pitch was usually punctuated with something like, “And if you know any good developers, please let me know.” Cennydd Bowles made the following observation after the first day of the conference:

I understand and support the rush to find good developers because I love all the local ideas entering the market (much of my own talk at Tech4Africa was dedicated to improving developer environments). But I’m concerned about tech startups[1] going on the hunt for developers without also looking for quality User Experience Design skills at the same time[2]. In Tart Up Your Startup! Erika Hall explains the dangers of ignoring UX in startups:

You are making UX design decisions as soon as you specify anything you expect another human to interact with, as soon as you specify anything that has implications for how a human might interact with it. Of course, you are are also making system design decisions, but we assume you are comfortable with that sort of thing.

So don’t pretend like you aren’t making design decisions already. And don’t make them by omission. You cannot NOT design something. The floor of Silicon Valley is littered with the crumbling husks of great ideas””useful products and services that died in the shell before they hatched out of their impenetrable engineering-specified interfaces.

So if this is so important, why are most South African tech startups (and large companies, for that matter) not looking for UX designers? In this article I’d like to explore what I believe the three main, interconnected explanations are, and how this is actually an opportunity for the design community to prove the value we can add to product development. I’d love to hear your thoughts and observations on this topic as well. If you think I’m missing the boat, please let me know.

1. Hiring is expensive

A very legitimate concern most startups have is that hiring people costs a lot of money, and making the wrong decisions on who to get involved can be extremely costly. So naturally the first requirement is a developer who can actually build the product. It’s logical, and the prudent thing to do. The danger is that you could end up wasting a lot of money by going down the wrong path if you don’t have design skills on board from the beginning.

It also has to be said that in some cases, startups take the considered approach to, as Erika Hall puts it in her article, “Get your nerds to swot up on usability principles and muddle through, yo.” It’s definitely an option, but if it doesn’t work it can turn out to be an expensive detour.

2. Limited visibility into the value of User Experience Design

As we were discussing this topic over breakfast at the conference, @ndorfin brought up the point that for most people, Design still means Graphic Design, or more specifically, Graphic Design for print. So it’s no surprise that tech startups don’t think about the need for a designer - they don’t see the value that something like billboard design could bring to their interactive product.

UX is, of course, a much larger concept used to describe the process of understanding a market and finding solutions that work for that market. User Experience Designers solve problems by uncovering user needs and helping to create products that meet those needs. Until an understanding and appreciation of the benefits of UX become pervasive in the South African tech space, it will not be highly sought after.

I want to be very clear about this. It’s not the tech community’s fault that the benefits of UX are generally not well understood. It’s our fault. As designers it is our responsibility to show others the value of what we do in a convincing way (i.e., irrefutable evidence of revenue/conversion increases). We can’t expect people to come ask us what we do like w’re at a high school dance waiting for someone to notice us. We have to make ourselves known, and do it loudly.

3. The current maturity level of User Experience Design in South Africa

UX is still in its infancy in South Africa. In @cennydd and @boxman’s session at Tech4Africa called March of the UX Designers they shared their views on the maturity cycle of a particular skill set in an organization. They talked about six distinct stages:

• Unrecognized
• Interested
• Invested
• Committed
• Engaged
• Embedded

Most organizations in the US and UK have reached at least the stage where everyone is committed to making UX a priority. Some are engaging people from multiple disciplines in the process, and others go so far as to have deeply embedded cultures of Design. In most South African organizations it feels like User Experience Design is still mostly unrecognized, or at best something ther’s mild interest in (with a few notable exceptions).

Again, I want to be clear that I’m not passing judgement here. I’m simply pointing out that we are at the beginning of a natural cycle that the UK and US have gone through as well. It’s a cycle we should be aware of, but it shouldn’t paralyze us. It’s actually an exciting place to be - we have an opportunity to make a real difference to how organizations do business.

What we can do about it

Ther’s one thing I know is not an option for us as a UX community in South Africa. We can’t play the victim and go sit in a corner, drawing sketches on napkins while we complain about how no one understands us. We know that when users struggle with an interface it’s our fault, not theirs. How is this situation any different? If w’re a misunderstood or unrecognized industry, how is that not our fault, and our problem to solve?

The only way to get UX to the next level of maturity in South Africa is to do what the US and UK did: we need to become childishly loud about what we do and how we can contribute to better products that make more money. Whether you do research, write content, or spend most of your time in OmniGraffle or Photoshop, it’s time to explain to our companies, our clients, the Internet, and the public space in South Africa what UX is and what value a user-centered design process can bring. We need to make it impossible to ignore UX during product development.

If we do that effectively, maybe next year w’ll see demand for an additional skill set at Tech4Africa”¦

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1. I’m refering specifically to startups that sell physical/virtual products/services, not the agency model of selling time. â†©
2. I’m making an and argument here, not an either/or argument - both types of skills are needed. â†©