Lately I’ve been starting a great number of blog posts, saving them as drafts, and then leaving them, unfinished, in my blog’s drafts queue for weeks (and now months) until at some point I realize the post is either no longer inspiring to me or somehow irrelevant. For example, Khoi Vinh recently posted a great article entitled “Designed for Deterioration“, about how products should be designed to deteriorate more gracefully, but meanwhile my own draft article entitled “Wearing In vs. Wearing Out” has been sitting around for three months, half-written.

The sad part is that these articles often linger at what I feel to be 80-90% completeness. Maybe it’s procrastination, maybe I’m a perfectionist… or maybe something critical is missing and I just can’t figure out what it is.

But then again, maybe I should, instead of just waiting for the final inspiration to appear to me in a vision, periodically pick out one of these draft essays, spend a maximum of five minutes finishing it the best that I can, and then just go ahead and publish it in whatever form I can get it to in those five minutes.

Maybe these hastily-completed essays will come out a bit half-baked, maybe a little haphazard… maybe it won’t even reach any kind of clear conclusion, leaving the reader waiting for me to finish my idea. But maybe it will finally

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I am speaking at two upcoming events sponsored by several New York-based information architecture organizations. When my wife asked who the organizers were, I said “It’s the IA Union!” At both events, I will be delivering a version of my informative, fast paced, and fun IA Summit presentation, “Interaction Design Style“.

July 19: IA Summit Redux

This Thursday, July 19, the NYC IA Meetup is throwing an “IA Summit Redux”, featuring six New York-area presenters from the 2007 IA Summit, sharing abridged versions of their Summit presentations. Avenue A|Razorfish is hosting at their midtown offices at 1440 Broadway (map).

The evening’s presenters will include:

• Chris Fahey (me!)
• Garrick Schmitt
• Joe Lamantia
• Lou Rosenfeld
• Michele Tepper
• Victor Lombardi

Doors open at 6:00, speakers begin at 6:30, wrapping up around 9:30. Refreshments will be served throughout. Seating is limited, and the event may well be fully booked up by now, but if you would like to attend, the RSVP address is rsvp-UX@avenuea-razorfish.com. Make sure to send your name, company name, and job title (so when you arrive you don’t have to indignantly ask “Do you know who I am?!?”).

This event is sponsored by the IA Institute, the NYC IA Meetup, and by Avenue A|Razorfish.

July 26: NYC IxDA

This is a solo show for me, a full hour of speaking and a dazzling display of all 250+ slides. It’s the extended epic story of Style and Interaction Design. All the essential information is here, more details coming soon…

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Several bloggers I know have confessed to me that occasionally they’ll compose and publish articles or posts that they don’t feel especially passionate about, writing things that they aren’t particularly proud of or inspired by, simply because they know that certain topics, ideas, or opinions will give them an easy and predictable traffic boost.

For example, they may sometimes “dumb down” or oversimplify their normally nuanced perspective, or they will overly sensationalize their opinion, or maybe they will take a firm position on something they don’t actually feel very strongly about at all, almost out of a sense of obligation. They will do this to reach out to a broader web audience, to attract new readers, to fire up or inspire their regulars. They will, in short, “write down” to their audience.

I have no problem with this, by the way, since I do it myself now and then. It’s something every blogger has to grapple with: Write for myself? Or write for the people who I want to visit my site?

Jakob Nielsen’s latest AlertBox, “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings” (in which he suggests that a writer’s biggest audience consists largely of people dumber than they are) makes me wonder just where I stand with respect to you, my own reader. Do I want you to look up to me? Do I look up to you?

The Bell Curve

Nielsen’s essay opens with the following short summary:

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

(Okay, this is a perfectly nice and pithy insight, something to take into consideration when devising an editorial strategy, I suppose. Still I can’t help but laugh at the double irony that follows this abstract. First, Nielsen spends the next several thousand words defending this “no duh” thesis not only by violating Steve Krug’s elegant “Omit needless words” web copywriting strategy, but also by trampling all over his own admonitions to online brevity. And in an almost comical measure of Nielsen’s attempt to avoid hypocrisy, this edition of the AlertBox seems to be packin’ a higher word count than many of his usual, shall we say, “quickly written” AlertBox postings.)

The essay also includes a diagram that seems to capture Nielsen’s core idea that a good content creator must look down on his or her readership. The diagram explicity suggests that bloggers should try to “dumb down” their ideas to reach the broadest possible audiences, the same big audiences that less qualified writers are reaching.

In this diagram, Jakob asks us to imagine that we are a leading expert in our field and that our content has immense value to our audience (an important assumption for any writer or publisher to make!!). He puts “You” at the head of the class, on the right side of the graph. He then plots out other writers — your competitors — and shows that many of those writers who are “less expert” than You clearly draw a far bigger audience than You do.

Notice how this diagram implicitly assumes that the most valuable audience (that is, the biggest audience) for any given content producer are those readers whose “expertise” is half that of You, the publisher/producer. If You want to reach the broadest possible audience then, according to Nielsen, You should aim not for the thin dimwit end of the scale on the far left, nor should You aim for your own immediate peers in the slender expert end on the right, but You instead should aim for the big fat mediocre center of the bell curve.

Of course those who are more expert than You simply don’t show up on Nielsen’s chart at all, which probably speaks volumes about Nielsen’s self-image. If you read between the lines, then it becomes clear that the more expert You are in the world of usability and user experience design, then the less useful Jakob Nielsen’s AlertBox will be to You, since presumably Nielsen is following his own advice and generally writing for an audience half as “expert” as he is. (Note: All of the following diagrams have been altered from Nielsen’s original.)

Bloggers and their Readers are Equals

But this is where I think Nielsen misses the mark the most: If there is any real social innovation to blogging, it is the fundamental destruction of the age-old (and IMHO baseless) assumption that simply by virtue of being a content publisher you are automatically superior to the people who merely consume what you publish. Now anyone can publish anything they want to a broad audience, and the lines have been blurred: between formal and informal writing, between fact and opinion, between institutional and personal perspectives.

Of course, many great blogs make deliberate decisions to gain or retain popularity by, for example, publishing often on topics their readers seem to enjoy most, or avoiding alienating readers with controversial content (when was the last time Signal vs. Noise posted something about politics?). But in the world of blogs this is the exception, not the rule. Bloggers generally have the freedom to publish primarily for themselves when they want to, and most of us exercise this freedom fairly often.

Bloggers Want to Reach Upwards

What’s more, bloggers publish aspirationally, hoping that people smarter than us will notice us and read what we have to say. This may not be how Nielsen sees his job, but that’s how I work: I write graphpaper.com assuming that readers of all kinds will reach my site, some less expert than I am, some more. I know that people at the “stupid” end will stumble into graphpaper.com now and then, but at the same time I am always hoping that people at the “expert” end will find something they enjoy here as well. Assuming that my audience is entirely “dumber” than me is not just arrogant, it’s simply not an option.

And because I have the freedom to publish on whatever subject I wish, from user experience design to art criticism, from politics to my personal life. The subjects of my posts will even sometimes land me way over my head on a subject I know little to nothing about (see “Me”, left, below), which can be at best amusing and at worst humiliating.

But this freedom also allows me to occasionally write about something I think my professional peers might find interesting and useful (see “Me”, right, below), something that I genuinely have “expertise” in. In other words, I can be all over the bell curve.

As is clear, there is no real “juicy center” to my audience at all. In all honesty, my audience, in my mind, is generally (a) me and (b) certain people I know and respect. My editorial capriciousness is hardly a good example of user-centered design, and it’s probably also bad business (in that it probably doesn’t help grow graphpaper.com’s loyal readership base). But it’s how blogs work, it’s an essential, fundamental dynamic of today’s user-generated/self-publishing culture.

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I was browsing through the CSS Zen Garden recently, and I was struck again at just how great it is. [If you’re not familiar with the CSS Zen Garden, go there and you’ll figure it out]

I don’t mean to say that I think the designs are all excellent (more than a few of them are a little cheesy). But I deeply appreciate that all of the examples are art directed, in the traditional sense of the word, to a degree that I rarely see on commercial web sites these days — even on sites for very stylish products and magazines.

Compare this to offline (i.e. print) editions where bold and dynamic art direction changes, often radically, from article to article or issue to issue. Flip through any issue of Wired, The New York Times Magazine, or almost any fashion or lifestyle magazine, and you’ll see new and different design approaches — different art direction — for nearly every feature article. Khoi wrote a very thoughtful peice about this over a year ago, lamenting that web design is more about safe, functional systems than about creatively ambitious art direction, but since then this unfortunate state of affairs has still not changed.

Most contemporary web sites strive to be effective content platforms, with a unified but flexible style in which the actual content — the words, pictures, and media — can shine. My own site is certainly of this sort. Very few of the biggest and highest-budget content web sites, in fact, have any strong sense of style or art direction outside of the limited set of page templates (often less than ten) used to deliver the aforementioned content, templates that differ so little from one another that they are essentially variations of the same page.

So if content is king, then design is at best the royal tailor. This is because, for most sites, the design of the site is not considered content at all.

But this is not how many of the best art-directed print magazines work. They’re more like the CSS Zen Garden, customizing the design as needed to not just work with the content but also to be a kind of content in itself.

Why can’t online magazines (especially online-only magazines) do exactly what the CSS Zen Garden does?

• Keep the site’s content normalized, semantically consistent, as it resides in the content management system — but apply a different, customized style sheet to many, or even all, of the articles posted in the site.
• Treat the site’s various cascading style sheets as another kind of content, integral to the article and to the site’s overall content strategy. Hire art directors and graphic designers proficient at CSS to build new style sheets for every new article and issue just as their print counterparts have been doing for decades.

In this model, when the user browses from an article about fashion to an article about science, the page template can change dramatically. The “cascading” part of this scheme will ensure that some underlying design essentials are kept consistent — for example maybe the body copy fonts and the core page grid — even as the page’s layout, illustration, colors, headlines, and other design elements change dramatically.

It’s a shame that for many of the talented designers at CSS Zen Garden, this free work may be some of the best work they’ll ever do, since so much of the real web design world is still unfortunately focused on eliminating idiosyncratic style wherever it crops up — instead of using it to make sites and user experiences better.

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Going through my server logs the other day, I discovered that my series of articles from last summer, User Research Smoke & Mirrors, was a required reading assignment for a User Experience Design class at the National University of Singapore, taught by Mr. Raghavendra Reddy.

In browsing the official site for the course, I was struck by the comprehensiveness of the reading lists and the depth of the course itself. Reddy’s students are required to create their own blogs, and all class assignments are to be submitted as blog posts. It is in the student blogs where I found these students to be remarkably thoughtful and insightful about interaction design and the power of good user research.

I know almost nothing about Singapore, but if this course and these students are representative of their education system, I’m duly impressed. Here’s a list of the students who reviewed my articles (the first five are my favorites): MORE…

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Will Wright’s cryptic, clip-art crazy PowerPoint slides make sense when he’s right there talking about them.

Microsoft’s PowerPoint is frequently blamed for the poor quality of many presentations and for a supposedly- disastrous state of communication in both the private and the public spheres. Public speakers are lambasted for their wooden stage presence, crippled by their over-reliance on projected slide shows and meaningless bullet-points. The slides themselves, too, are often rife with design crimes ranging from clip-art diarrhea to impenetrable verbosity.

And because of the ubiquity of the tool and the technique, because public speakers from Al Gore to members of Australia’s Parliament use slideshows to support their speeches, the software itself has become the de facto target of criticism. I don’t think this is quite fair.

[For the purpose of this argument, Keynote on the Mac is basically the same animal as PowerPoint, so with apologies to both Microsoft and Apple I’ll just use the term “PowerPoint” to mean any slideshow method or tool.] MORE…

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The word “experience” comes from the Latin word “experīrī”, or to try.

It’s strange, then, that in modern English the two words, “experience” and “try”, have such different meanings: when we try something we tend to take a sip or a nibble, get our toes wet, or go for a test drive around the block. But when we experience something, we allow it to overtake and engulf us, we admit it fully into our spaces, our lives. A deeper and more lasting understanding is achieved, something fundamentally different than what we get from merely trying something.

The purpose of user experience design, or UXD, is to understand that user behavior can be seen as part of a holistic experiential model instead of as a shallow, temporary hit-and-run encounter. In the domain of user experience, then, we must not mistake trying something for experiencing it.

The most revolutionary products, the things you “never knew you wanted but can’t live without”, only catch on when people are able to move quickly from trying to experiencing.

Some of the ramifications of this distinction include:

Product Reviewing: When testing a new product to see what it’s all about, consider adopting it thoroughly instead of just tinkering around with it. As you explore the product, ask yourself if you are using it like someone who actually bought it with the intention of using it, or if you are merely sweeping through it for a quick overview. At a wine tasting you aren’t supposed to swallow the stuff, but sometimes if you want to understand what it’s really all about you simply have to drink the Kool Aid.

Restaurant reviewers will visit the same establishment five or six times, on different days of the week and at different times of the day. When exploring a new product, consider taking the same approach — how differently would you use it on a busy day versus a slow day, at home versus at work, in a good mood or in a bad mood?

Trying new Social Apps: This is particularly important with social apps, where this phenomenon is exponentially true. You cannot experience a social app unless you are part of a group of people who are all experiencing it together. You cannot, for example, understand what Twitter really is until 20+ people (people who you actually care about) are connected to you as friends and all 20+ of you are using Twitter in your own idiosyncratic ways. A social networking app does not even really exist until there are groups of users trying it out.

Usability Testing: The purpose of usability testing is to simulate the planned user experience as closely as possible. By being conscious of the fact that some experiences involve long commitments and/or large numbers of participants, a usability test may need to be structured very differently than they are today. A prototype for testing may need to be pre-populated with legacy cruft and clutter, as if the test subject had been using it for years. And again, for social apps, this is even more pronounced: Public Betas are, in fact, the best way we currently have to test social apps, but maybe someone will devise a way of simulating the cruft and clutter by simulating real people in a network where few real people actually exist.

Product (or Website!) Design: Allow your users to rapidly transition from trying your product to experiencing it, by making the initial stages of the interaction with the product as seductive and addictive as possible. Apple’s “out of the box” seduction is the gold standard for this, but the tradition goes back to the simpler arts: James Bond movies always open with a high-voltage action sequence. And the most basic rule of journalism is to catch the reader’s attention in the first paragraph.

In Dont Make Me Think, Steve Krug posits that the first question a web site should answer for a user is “what is this?” It’s surprising how many sites fail utterly at this. If your web page cannot tell a user immediately what the hell it is, why it’s useful, etc., you’re already putting up a major obstacle between trying and experiencing. Krug’s book, in fact, can easily be seen as a concise manual on how to smooth the path from try to experience.

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It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. I mean really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style.

Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking. So here’s all the stuff:

Slideshow

• Slideshow as PDF (19mb PDF)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 1 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 2 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 3 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 4 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 5 of 5)

Reading List

These readings are in roughly the same pedagogical sequence that the concepts appeared in my presentation. Note that not all of these were actually cited in the talk, but I did have all of them either at hand or in mind as I wrote.

MORE…

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