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.

Andy Mangold discusses the design decisions made by Dribbble in Dribbble is Not a Platform for Critique:

By design, Dribbble rewards style and aesthetics, not concept or context. [”¦]

The “like” button sits right next to the screenshot itself, at the top of a column of actions, above the fold on even the smallest screen. Hierarchically, this is what Dribbble has decided is important. [”¦]

Commenting however, the only way Dribbble provides for giving critical feedback on a shot, is treated much differently. The comment box is below the shot itself, and as soon as two or three comments have stacked up it’s off the bottom of the screen. Because of this, it’s not possible on most shots to look at the image while you’re typing the content of your comment.

Andy argues that Dribbble has a legitimate place “to showcase details of your work, document your style, connect with other designers, and from what I hear a decent way to find freelance jobs (if you’re popular)”, but if you’re looking for honest critique on your designs, this isn’t the place for you. His article reminded me of Jon Tan’s Taxidermista — an essay in Issue #1 of The Manual. Jon points out one of the dangers of design galleries like Dribbble:

Galleries misrepresent web design as a state, not a process. They divorce what a site does from how it looks. They celebrate style and tone, not purpose. [”¦]

By purpose I refer to the appropriateness of the style and tone. Do they fit the project? That question is rarely asked or answered by galleries. The only reaction galleries solicit is an emotional one. Like or don’t like. Hot or not.

This is the core issue with design galleries — they’re not records of a designer’s decision-making and thought process, they’re artifacts of that process. That’s useful too, of course, but not in isolation. It’s essential to know why a designer chose a certain style and tone, and how it helps to solve the core design problem. Without that context, it’s impossible to know if it’s good design.

Bryan Larrick critiques the new Kindle app for iPad in Improved Reading Experience? No. I particularly like his points on how design impacts readability:

It’s hard to overstate the importance of healthy margins and whitespace in good design. [”¦] The words are the most important aspect of a book. That’s intuitive. But, presentation is very important. Having ample margins helps the eye flow over the text and makes it easier to move from one line to the next while reading. Making the margins smaller in the app hinders the ease with which the eye can move over the page, making the book harder to read, not easier. Also, it’s just ugly.

So obvious, yet so often ignored on web sites and in apps.

Towards the end of Finding Meaning in the Technium Cave — Francisco Inchauste’s essay for Distance 02 — he urges us to be more cognizant of the lasting impact of our work:

What we create today will become the baseline for future generations. In the future, explorers will find our technium cave, filled with the artifacts of our present. What will they find in there? What will our creations tell them about what was meaningful to us? I can only hope it’s not what I see today. I know it can change, and I hope you see it too.

This is the theme that echoes through Distance 02, a collection of three essays on the topic of “Extracurriculars” — how to take ourselves out of the daily grind and think more clearly about how the things we make impact the world around us. It’s a topic that I see more and more designers touch on, starting with Wilson Miner’s excellent When We Build talk, all the way through Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design, parts of Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job, and smaller essays like Dmitry Fadeyev’s Moral Design. I’ve also touched on this before:

I wonder what would happen if we felt the weight of responsibility a little more when w’re designing. What if we go into each project as if the design will be around for 100 years or more? Would we make it fit into the web environment better, aim to give it a timeless aesthetic, and spend more time considering the consequences of our design decisions? Would we try to design something that “makes life worth living”?

The cynic in me worries that this vitally important topic is getting a bit too trendy, which brings with it lots of attention but also hoards of Internet critics. But before the possible backlash gets into full swing there is still time to read Distance 02 and be challenged to be better designers, not just people who design things better. For example, Sharlene King urges us to do more side projects in Do Your Homework:

I believe success comes through homework: the projects we do separate from our day-to-day work, that help us live design rather than simply work in design, allow passionate designers to break through.

And in The Embedded Designer, Cassie McDaniel talks about designers’ ability to influence adjacent industries in a positive way:

While design processes are available to anyone, regular experience with the creative process makes the designer particularly adaptable to new environments. An eagerness to understand the nature of our design challenges is part of our mandate. We ask tough questions of our clients and their industries. We need to know: Why are things done this way? What problem is it solving? What can we get rid of to make this simpler? Designers are receptive to new input by definition, and that makes us inherently more malleable than other kinds of workers.

What I found pleasantly surprising about Distance 02 is that it doesn’t stick to the philosophical. There is plenty of practical advice on how to make these ideas real in our everyday design work. Francisco’s framework for measuring meaning will come in particularly handy in all my projects.

Like any publication, Distance 02 is not perfect. It buckles under the weight of its 100+ citations, which sometimes makes it hard to follow the authors’ own story threads through the essays. Either that, or I’m just very easily distracted.

But that is a small complaint, and certainly not enough to make me discourage you from reading the book in any format your heart desires. In fact, at $5 for a digital copy and $15 for print & digital, it’s pretty much a no-brainer. You can buy Distance here.

I remember when Wilson Miner’s talk When We Build first hit the web with a bang — for days you couldn’t open Twitter without seeing a link to it. I don’t know why, but I just never got around to watching it until today. It is, in a word, extraordinary. I generally don’t want to post things that you’ve likely seen before, but I need to make an exception on this one, just in case some of you procrastinated like I did.

It’s not really possible to summarize, but if I had to, I’d say that the talk is loosely based on John Ruskin’s words from his 1849 book The Seven Lamps of Architecture:

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, “See! This our father did for us.”

If you can make 40 minutes to watch this, you won’t regret it.

Jim Dalrymple in The Surface and the iPad:

From what I’ve seen, it seems to me that Microsoft is trying to do a similar type of dance with the Surface that it did with previous tablets. The company is trying to convince consumers that this device can be a computer and a tablet at the same time. Based on the sales of the iPad, I’m not sure that’s what consumers really want.

Exactly. This is the core of the problem with Microsoft’s “no compromise” strategy. As Kieran Healy pointed out in his response to that approach:

Uncompromising designers make products that will not appeal to everyone, or be of equal use to everyone, or do everything equally well. On the other hand, IT products advertised to consumers as having “no compromises” try to please everyone all of the time. From the perspective of the Dieter Ramses of this world, Sinofsky’s repeated use of the phrase “no compromises” means exactly the opposite of what it says — and more or less guarantees that the product will actually be riddled with design compromises, all made in an ultimately futile effort to keep everyone happy.

Or to summarize using John Gruber’s words:

[C]ompromises enforce simplicity and obviousness in design.

Maybe we’ll all be proved wrong about this. But I just don’t see how a tablet that doesn’t know if it’s a tablet or a computer won’t be confusing to users.

(By the way, speaking of Jim Dalrymple — you have to check out this Tumblr site dedicated to his awesome beard)

Khoi Vhin makes a good point about Apple products in Built to Not Last:

Some objects look better when you use them more, but not Apple stuff. Every scratch, scuff, ding and crack serves to alienate us a little bit further from the hardware we own, and to make us yearn a bit more for the newer, more pristine hardware we have yet to buy.

I will go further and say that this is all part of Apple’s planned obsolescence strategy:

[A] policy of planning or designing a product with a limited useful life, so it will become obsolete, that is, unfashionable or no longer functional after a certain period of time.

What’s interesting about Apple’s version of this well-known policy is how they limit the “useful life” of their products. Planned obsolescence usually refers to things that are manufactured to break after a certain period of time — hence the classic joke about how your washing machine always breaks down a day after the warranty runs out. In contrast, Apple’s products (usually) don’t break after a certain period of time — they become uncool. And they do so by design.

Apple is famous for having no fear about cannibalizing their own products. The classic example is the iPhone, which has vastly reduced the number of iPods being sold. A side benefit of this approach is the planned obsolescence it introduces into the ecosystem. They continue to make cooler products without worrying about killing off one of their own in the process. This makes their old products look uncool, which “forces” users to upgrade to the latest thing.

It’s a devious, brilliant strategy.

I’ve been a fan of Alex Charchar’s work for a long time. He is a designer whose essays on Retinart have always inspired me a great deal. Yet none of his previous work could have prepared me for his essay The Colors of Grief, which was published in Issue #2 of The Manual earlier this year.

In this gut-wrenching piece of work Alex describes, in honest and heartbreaking detail, the ongoing healing process he and his wife are going through after their daughter passed away less than 12 hours after her birth. He explains the role that design and creative work are playing to slowly bring color back into their lives, and in doing so, he teaches us about the power of Design as a force for good in the world. It is, simply put, one of the most impactful essays I have ever read.

A while later I quoted a paragraph from The Colors of Grief in an article for Smashing Magazine entitled Designer Myopia:

I now know that it is through love and passion and happiness that anything of worth is brought into being. A fulfilled and accomplished life of good relationships and craftsmanship is how I will earn my keep.

Alex contacted me after reading the article, and thus began an ongoing email conversation that I have enjoyed immensely. Such is the way of the Internet — random connections can turn into lasting friendships if we just pay attention. But that’s a post for a different day.

I asked Alex if he’d be interested in answering some questions about his work and his writing process, and he generously agreed. What follows is more of a conversation than an interview as we discuss his thoughts on design, typography, corporate politics, and the process of writing his essay for The Manual. I hope you enjoy it.

What is your current role — how do you spend your days?

I’m a senior graphic designer at an in-house studio within a university, doing a lot of promotional materials for both internal and external audiences. For the last five years my focus has mostly been print based, but as the uni is currently looking at how we’re going to deliver content to students via smart phones and tablets, there’s been a lot more exploration, experimentation and research being done in terms of what’s worth pursuing. Luckily some people have realised that design will play quite a role in it all, so I’ve been in an increasing number of conversations and projects because of it.

It’s a good place to work and I work with great people, but there are often times when the usual drudge of being part of an in-house comes to the surface, mostly in the form of politics, overhead and repetitive basket-weaving kind of work in which we have to stick very tightly to established designs. It’s amazing how much gets in the way of actually being able to do the work.

Having worked at a university for a while as well, I’m all too aware of some of these challenges. Have you found ways to overcome some of the significant political obstacles you encounter in your day-to-day work? Have you been able to use design to solve some of the issues?

Ah! We share a pain and so I’d imagine we probably shared a similar approach to dealing with it! I first tried to keep up, which failed miserably. I just want to get to my work and not learn another half dozen acronyms and keep up with who is in which department this week, and what project is being explored by what committee who reports to which managerial group. Just too messy for me. So now I listen when it directly influences our group or work, play the game a little when it’s fun (and can get me onto good projects), and ignore everything else I can.

You have a strong interest in typography as well. Has this always been the case, or is it a recent passion? What draws you to typography?

It’s been something I’ve loved almost since the beginning. When I first began playing around with graphic design, I hated having to spend so much time sourcing good photos to play with (this was mostly for graphic art, not graphic design, but that’s where I started), and so I tried to focus on making type work well. It was more convenience than anything else ”“ when you use stock photography or illustration the design often suffers, but there’s nothing that suffers when you use a classic typeface. Nothing is lost by it having been used a million times before. This introduced new challenges ”“ establishing how to communicate emotion and generate interest using only type? Fun!

I had always respected typography a great deal ”“ Bringhurst’s classic has been used more than any other book and was one of the first I ever purchased and poured myself into. But when I started to look at design history and stumbled over European modernism I was hooked. A quick flirt with Tschichold turned into a passion that I still have today. It helps that using a good typeface can feel like cheating ”“ so much of the work has already been done by the type designer. The role of graphic designer is often to shut up and get out of the way so the typeface can shine.

I’d love to know a bit more detail around The Colors of Grief — the writing process, the editing, and as much as you’re comfortable sharing about all the emotions that went along with that.

It was rough and moved very slowly.

At first I knew I had to write just to move some emotions and ideas around. I came to realise that the only chance I had of being able to move in any direction was if I explored what was going on internally by stringing together some words and hoping some light would shine through. It ended up being quite an emotional purge as I wished to pour as much of myself onto the page as possible.

On occasion I found myself stuck in every sense of the word. I couldn’t move, nor think outside of a restrained sentence, staring painfully at the cursor, knowing what I had to tap out, what had to be said. It was important to me to be completely honest. I felt to hide any part of what I was going through, to pretend I wasn’t as hurt as I was (and continue to be) would be a small crime against what I was feeling and against anyone who might end up reading the story of my daughter. I would often use the pain as a guide, knowing that the more an idea mentioned would hurt, the more important it was for me to show it to people.

In writing this essay I was asking people to come along a very personal journey with me, and to then hide things from them felt horribly dishonest ”“ if they were willing to have me guide them through this painful story, they deserved everything I could give.

It sounds like even early on, you had a sense that sharing your story will somehow become part of the healing process. Is that an accurate assumption? Did you spend a lot of time wondering how people will react, and did it influence your process in any way?

Yeah, that’s spot on. As alluded to above, I’m increasingly feeling that for anything creative to be memorable it needs to be brutally honest ”“ and I wanted this story to be memorable for both those who read it and myself. I wanted to know that I did the best I possibly could to heal what had been broken, no matter how small a step it might have been. I freaked out quite a bit about how people would react. There were a few moments where I thought it was getting too heavy and people might feel that I was exploiting their emotions and the story of my daughter for the sake of an article. Carolyn (my editor) talked me off that ledge a couple of times, normally saying something along the lines of “the people who would think that way aren’t the people you’re writing for.” In the end I think we cut out anything that got in the way of the raw elements of the story.

So how did it get from words on a page to being an essay in The Manual?

In the end I had a ‘draft’ that was several thousand words long and so I started the process of editing, occasionally complaining on Twitter, and I think I posted a photo or two of our kitchen table covered in print outs with red scribbles all over them. This is when something amazing happened ”“ Carolyn Wood, who I might have spoken to briefly once or twice before, asked if there was anything she could help with. I had only shown a couple of people very close to me what I was doing. Being that this was Carolyn Wood, I thought “why not?” This was perhaps one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.

She looked at it as a personal favor, with no thought of The Manual on either of our minds (especially mine). It was one of the sweetest and most generous things anyone has ever done for me. What followed was many, many chats over Skype as we worked through the article line by line, sentence by sentence. She showed an amazing gift for getting the best out of my writing in an amazingly delicate way. The patience she showed me was unparalleled as she would guide me through the rough patches, and a great comfort was found in knowing that a laugh was only a moment away if we needed to reach for it. There were some days when we would work on only a single phrase, as we would laugh hysterically through stories and jokes, she would make fun of my Australian accent or my ability to use about a thousand words when three would do. There were a few moments, especially towards the end, where both our voices would crack and one of us would go quiet, most often myself, but I always felt very safe in the company of a trusted friend. I had never known what it was like to trust another person with your work so completely, but I knew that my words and ideas were perfectly safe and well kept. It was a very unique experience and one I still think about when I think of how generous and wonderful people can be.

When we were getting closer to finishing our work, she raised the idea of the article being in The Manual. I’m not sure I’ll ever forget that feeling. The authors who had been in the first one were amongst my favorites and the idea of having my words about my daughter printed in something so beautiful took my breath away. From there things moved quickly and before I knew it I was holding in my hands one of the biggest highlights of my career.

What kind of reactions did you get to the essay?

It was incredible. I got the kindest words from people who I had never met, old friends, writers and designers I admired, some shared very personal stories with me, others told me they cried, spent time with their family and friends because of what I had written. It was an experience like no other. All so incredibly positive. To know that, in a way, people cried with me and exposed themselves in such a personal way… that’s an amazing gift, one so generously given to me by Carolyn, Andy and their amazing audience.

It’s been quite a while since The Manual Issue #2 came out, so I’m assuming reactions to the essay have become a bit less frequent. Can I ask: how are you doing now?

One or two people have recently picked up a copy when I’ve told them I was lucky enough to be included and have come back with more words of support. Sometimes I get nothing, which I think is natural. It’s a topic that’s rich with awkwardness. The wave of feedback has long since passed.

These days my wife and I are doing ok. Things aren’t nearly as dark for us as they were, but we miss our daughter everyday. We talk about her so frequently ”“ about the little buds of personality that were coming through even when she was in the womb, about what she would be doing now, who she would have turned into. But we’re doing ok ”“ many couples breakdown through such an experience, and we consider ourselves lucky to have gone the other way and gotten much closer and stronger as a unit. We tend to laugh and joke around a lot more than we use to (though we were always playful), while also spending more time together.

What are your thoughts on the relationship between writing and design? Do you feel writing makes you a better designer, and vice versa? Is there anything in particular that draws you to wanting to get your thoughts on paper?

This is an awesome question — it’s something I think about fairly often as the parallels come to light the more I practice either.

Personally, writing has made me a better designer because it’s forced me to do more research and make sure of any ideas before I published them. It also, and I’m stealing this from someone (I think Zeldman tweeted it, but I might be wrong), helps organise your thoughts so you know what you think. Writing isn’t necessarily solely about expression as much as it is about giving shape to your ideas so that you can easily mold them. In this regard it’s made me a far better designer.

In terms of writing, I think the process I’ve learned to produce a piece of design have adapted well to any writing I do ”“ collecting scraps early on, thinking about the problem at hand and what a solution might look like, sketching out a rough, filling in the gaps and then refining, refining, refining, while always trying to have something pretty come out of it all. And the last steps for either design or writing seem to be the same for me ”“ I go over what’s in front of me looking to find any pockets where a bit of spice can be added and what rough edges can be removed.

Writing tends to make most other elements of my life better. I’ve gotten amazing opportunities from it, have met great people and been challenged, almost always for the better. It makes the rest of my day feel better, too. When I wake up at 5am and write for a couple hours, no matter how the rest of the day unfolds, I feel as if I have already done what I need to in order to earn my breath. I begin to look at situations and people differently ”“ objectively looking at them and myself from the point of view of someone trying to understand what’s going on and what the reason is behind things said and done. Trying to find little pieces of wisdom in every experience started to come naturally after spending hours editing my writing to find the same.

Do you have any other writing plans in the pipeline?

Yes! I’m trying, anyway. I’m wanting to relaunch my blog and focus on writing in a very serious way, but discipline is a huge issue for me at the moment. I just haven’t found that perfect rhythm of reading and writing every single day. It’s that frustrating moment where you know what to do, you can see it and feel it and smell it and taste it, it’s right there, barely an inch from reach. But you just can’t quite get to it. That’s where I am. I’m hoping as long as I keep stretching my fingers out, I’ll stop tickling the edges and finally grab ahold of the writing habit and be able to keep it safely in my pocket.

You should follow Alex on Twitter, spend some time on Retinart, and of course, read The Colors of Grief.

I urge each and every one of you to seek out projects that leave the world a better place than you found it. We used to design ways to get to the moon; now we design ways to never have to get out of bed. You have the power to change that.

Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job

We push so much data into the world. Tweets and blog posts and Facebook photos and on and on it goes. I’m worried that the things we say — wait, let me make this personal. I’m worried that the things I say and do and make aren’t always respectful of the limited time and attention that you have at your disposal.

Nothing exemplifies this issue more than automated tweets made by apps like Foursquare, GetGlue, Path, etc. In a post that is now unfortunately password protected, Frank Chimero calls this kind of automated sharing “huffing the exhaust of other peopl’s digital lives”. I can’t think of a better description than that. I know we’re not supposed to tell people how to tweet, but I have to ask: is this kind of automated “content creation” really worth other people’s time? What value does it add to their lives?

I’m increasingly thinking that the things we do and make should aim to take unnecessary stuff away from people, not add more crap to their lives. This is a principle that most web and mobile applications certainly do not subscribe to. We seem almost incapable of saying “no” to shininess and more features, mostly to the detriment of the purpose of the site or application. This description by Garr Reynolds unfortunately sums the situation up too well:

These cluttered and distracting multimedia creations, filled with the superfluous and the nonessential, incorporating seemingly every special effect, color, and font the software had to offer, end up assaulting the brains of anyone who dares to look in the general direction of the screen.

Instead of just adding all the things to the world, I wish we would think more about how we can effectively remove complexities to make life easier for our users and the people who give us their time and attention. After all, the things we design become our legacy:

Great design starts with a problem statement and then proposes a solution. What you design, the way you solve the problem represents your values and ideals — it presents your vision of the good life. In solving a problem, you make certain things easier and other things harder — through intention or by omission. You assume many things about your customers, how they will engage with the solutions you have built and what they will value/the benefits they will enjoy when they use your design. This is true of companies, products and services and in each case thoughtful, detail oriented problem solving that puts the consumer first speaks most clearly.

These thoughts are all related to intent — the purpose behind the things we do, and the need for us to take responsibility for that intent. This fantastic TED talk by John Hockenberry, below, goes into the idea of intentional design in great depth and with much eloquence. It feels a lot quicker than 20 minutes, so I highly recommend that you watch it:

The point is simply this: when we do things with good intent, we show that we have empathy for our audience/users, and we try to improve their lives in some way.

Now, all of this brings me to the central question I’ve been asking myself the past few weeks. Actually, it’s a question Paul Ford planted in my mind:

If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

I wish I knew the answer to his question. I don’t. But I know this: before I tweet something, before I start writing, and most importantly, before I start a new design project, I will ask myself: am I being a good steward of my audience’s time and attention? Because I’d like to design for those who want to go to the moon, not those who don’t want to get out of bed.

How the Apple Store Seduces You With the Tilt of Its Laptops:

But the main reason notebook computer screens are slightly angled is to encourage customers to adjust the screen to their ideal viewing angle — in other words, to touch the computer. It’s also why all computers and iPads in the Apple Store are loaded with apps and software and connected to the Internet. Apple wants you to see the display for yourself and to experiment with apps and web sites to experience the power and performance of the devices. Customers in an Apple Retail Store can spend all the time they want playing with the devices and using the Internet — nobody will pressure them to leave.

Multisensory experiences build a sense of ownership. Interactivity is built in to every aspect of the Apple Store experience. For example, trainers who teach customers how to use Apple products in “One to One” workshops do not touch the computer without permission. Instead they guide customers to find the solutions themselves. You see, the Apple Store was never created on the premise that people want to buy stuff. Instead Apple discovered that by creating an ownership experience, customers would be more loyal to the brand.

Filed under “Evidence that experiences can be designed”.