A quick thought for this fine Friday: Something about the term “Getting Things Done” always bugged me. Now I know what it is. It’s the passive voice.

Instead of the indirect phrasing using the verb “to get”, maybe we really should simply say “Doing Things“. GTD isn’t about getting other people to do things — it’s about you doing things. Even delegation is something you have to actively do.

Or, as Nike said, “Just Do It” (an expression that adman Dan Weiden now says he thought up after reading Gary Gilmore’s last words as he faced a firing squad).

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Al Gore and Iron Eyes Cody. Go check out the original TV ads: Canoe and Horseback

Whenever I am about to do something wasteful, like throwing a plastic bottle in the trash or turning the air conditioner on when it’s 74 degrees, my wife says these words to me: “Think of Al Gore.”

The phrase, like the Christian “WWJD?” (”What would Jesus do?”), makes you look at your own actions through the eyes of someone who is working tirelessly to make the world better. The perspective forces you to make a choice. Now I ask this question to myself, too. Al Gore has become a living reminder to us all that we should constantly think about the big picture, about how our actions and decisions contribute to climate change one way or the other.

In fact, in my own mind I take my wife’s advice a little further, making it into a more vivid and visual connection. You see, despite his 2007 triumphs (Oscar and Nobel), Al Gore is still, to me, a tragic figure, not just because of his 2000 election loss, but because of the sheer magnitude of the challenge he faces in fighting environmental catastrophe. Whenever I “think of Al Gore”, it’s hard for me not to imagine him shedding a tear for my careless or lazy behavior. It invariably makes me think of the classic 1970’s TV public service announcement featuring a Native American canoeing and riding his horse through a modern and thoroughly polluted America, having trash thrown at him from a speeding car, and ending with him shedding a single gut-wrenching tear at the sheer monstrosity and callousness of the American people.

Watching those ads in the 1970s, and seeing Al Gore today, I think about how being environmentally responsible isn’t difficult so much as it merely not being a lazy brutal bastard. You don’t have to spend every day on a soapbox spreading the word and rallying your neighbors to political action — Al Gore, and hundreds of thousands of others like him, are doing that for us already. Back in the 1970’s, it was barely even uncool to throw garbage out of your car window, much less illegal. But because of the pressure against such behavior, both social and legislative, tolerance for such barbarism is plummeting.

Doing the right thing is quite often simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing. Or to put it more simply, it usually simply means “Don’t be a dick.”

(I also suspect that many people have a visceral negative reaction to Al Gore specifically because he makes them feel like dicks for their irresponsible behavior.)

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The New York Times is ending their TimesSelect “service” as of tomorrow, September 19th. Despite my deep resentment of the whole TimesSelect idea in the first place, I applaud the Times’ decision to end it and to finally align themselves with the way the web’s culture of thought actually works.

During the 2004 election cycle, Times columnists like Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and the rest of the Op-Ed talking heads would regularly be part of my daily readings, and they were an important part of the national political dialogue. Countless blogs would link to them, quote them, and respond to their influential voices. But then when the Times instituted the TimesSelect paywall, all of these thought-provoking voices were silenced, almost overnight. They became invisible to me and literally millions of other regular and loyal readers.

Sure many of the Times’ paper subscribers (who get TimesSelect memberships as part of their subscription price) continued to read these columnists. But the rest of us, those who read the Times online only, pretty much lost contact with them completely. Bloggers ceased linking to them, and eventually they ceased even talking about them. They lost relevance, influence, and credibility. And, as a result, the Times did, too.

As I’ve said before, I have no idea if TimesSelect was a good business decision in 2005 or not. My gut tells me that, ultimately, it was not. It probably didn’t drive many additional subscriptions (people who want a paper delivered to their homes will subscribe anyway, regardless of online add-ons), and it’s hard to imagine that there are more than a few thousand people in the world who are willing to pay the annual fee for just web access to the TimesSelect content.

I’d guess that the total number of people who actually paid the annual fee was tiny in comparison to the number of people who simply stopped reading the Times as much as they used to. The lost revenue from advertising impressions and page views may have been comparable to the revenue gained from the small number of subscriptions and online memberships they gained.

But more importantly, the Times lost some of their their momentum in being an influential force in the blogosphere, and thus in the emerging zeitgeist of the political and cultural dialogues that occur increasingly online. They stopped investing in their own reputation and positioning in today’s networked conversations. And unfortunately, damage like this is hard to repair — it’s like spending two years without contributing to your 401k plan, missing out on two years of accrued credit and growth.

They’ve got a lot of catching up to do, but I for one will glady jump right back in. Welcome back to the interweb, Op-Ed columnists!

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This book, “The Manual: How to Have a Number One Hit the Easy Way” (The cover actually drops the word “Hit”, making an lovely double entendre), changed my life. It was written by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty (aka The Timelords, aka The KLF) back in 1988, hot on the heels of their doing precisely what the title says: producing a number one hit in the UK, a cheeky little song called Doctorin’ the Tardis.

Before I go any further, if you are the person I lent this book to years ago, please return it to me!

There, that’s out of the way. Now, as for the book, it’s a sweeping and cynical look at the recording industry, and on the surface it’s quite literally exactly what the title says: a step-by-step guide to writing, producing, recording, and releasing a hit song that will reach Number One on the UK’s Top of the Pops. But beneath all of that, the book is a no-nonsense analysis of the nature of creativity itself in a world where almost everything creative is also in some way commercial. “The Manual” came to me today after reading Liz Danzico’s own hand-wringing over being inspired by the work of others.

My favorite parts deal directly with this question, with the origins of originality and the ethics of allowing yourself to be steeped in influence and inspiration.

Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested. They have to believe it is through this sojourn they arrive at the grail; the great and original song that the world will be unable to resist.

So why don’t all songs sound the same? Why are some artists great, write dozens of classics that move you to tears, say it like it’s never been said before, make you laugh, dance, blow your mind, fall in love, take to the streets and riot? Well, it’s because although the chords, notes, harmonies, beats and words have all been used before their own soul shines through; their personality demands attention. This doesn’t just come via the great vocalist or virtuoso instrumentalist. The Techno sound of Detroit, the most totally linear programmed music ever, lacking any human musicianship in its execution reeks of sweat, sex and desire. The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes - a million years of pain and lust.

I couldn’t agree more. Sure it sounds incredibly cynical, but please also note the deep sense of hope and optimism in the artist’s ability to produce original work despite the fact that we are all drowning in influences. We do not need to suffer (and suffer is the right word) from Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence if we simply have faith in our own voices.
In fact, this anxiety about producing work free from the influence of other artists and styles actually suffocates creativity. “The Manual” goes on to say:

Creators of music who desperately search originality usually end up with music that has none because no room for their spirit has been left to get through. The complete history of the blues is based on one chord structure, hundreds of thousands of songs using the same three basic chords in the same pattern. Through this seemingly rigid formula has come some of the twentieth century’s greatest music.

I love this book (and I wish I had my copy back!). You should love it too. And since it’s no longer available in print, and since “KLF” stands for “Kopyright Liberation Front”, I have posted the full plaintext of the book below the jump for your reading enjoyment. Enjoy! MORE…

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In the responses to my proposal to use the second- person perspective in interaction design documentation, Oleh Kovalchuke brought up an excellent concern:

The flaw with this approach is that “you, the developer” have different cultural background/ experience/ expectations than “her, the blog reader”.

This is one of the reasons for creating and referring to personas.

Good point. Using the word “you” in documentation can risk implying, if only subconsciously, that the reader of the documentation — usually a developer, designer, etc — is the same person who will actually use the system.

Still, I think I have a workaround. If the whole point is to foster empathy for the end-user of a product, explicitly demanding that the developer think of themselves as a user. Maybe a better formulation would be more literally like a traditional “Choose Your Own Adventure” literary model, prefacing and contextualizing the whole document and process around role-playing:

“You are Beth, the frequent shopper. You click SUBMIT and then click OKAY in the confirmation dialog box.”

By frequently reminding the developer just whose shoes they need to continually imagine themselves in, the second person is given this missing context of projection.

But what if we took it one step further? Most of the best designers I know have an amazing degree of built-in ability to imagine themselves actually being their customers and actually using their products (and conversely, the worst designers are borderline Asperger’s sufferers, with little ability to even imagine another person’s perspective).

Perhaps another approach, then, would be to require the designer him/herself to write in the first person, role playing as the user, writing a real-time account of using the system.

“I am Beth, the frequent shopper. I click SUBMIT and then click OKAY in the confirmation dialog box.”

Food for thought. Has anyone seen or used documentation using these alternative perspectives (second and first person?)

(Next: Me vs. You (vs. i) )

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Ceci n’est pas les useurs. (Is the use of little iconic, anonymous, faceless, android-like icons even more dehumanizing than using the word “user”?)

There’s a huge debate going on in the UX community about the use of the word “user”. Some argue that the word demeans the people we are trying to help, that it distances us from them, and that it makes us unable to truly empathize with their wants and needs. Words like “people” and “humans” are suggested instead, reminding us that our users are, in fact, human beings just like us.

I am at best bemused by the arguments, honestly. They feel a little phony, like a way for traditional usability and HCI folks — or marketing people for that matter — to feel or appear a little more folksy and less clinical about their approach to understanding their, um, users. Calling them by a new, friendly-sounding name seems like an effort to undo a possble perception that one may be out of touch with the emerging power of social media and user(oops, I did it again)-generated content.

Jim Drew on the IxDA List said it best, I think:

I find the push to avoid “user” as parallel to referring to employees as “cast members” or any of the other terms which seem clever the first time and make you roll your eyes thereafter. Some weird combo of branding and political correctness.

Does replacing “the user” with “the person” really an improvement? Does using “the person” endear the user (or person) to a product’s designers any better? Does the word “people” engender more empathy than the word “users”? I don’t think so. To me “the person” is equally dull and abstract than user. It’s more awkward and contrived, too — I mean, who actually talks that way?

Besides, the word “user” is a perfectly decent and useful word for when you want to describe an interaction design in a general sense, such as when describing the way a combo box works. I intend to keep using it. I also intend to use other words whenever they are more relevant and appropriate, such as “customer”, “player”, “reader”, “viewer”, “employee”, “renter”, or whatever other term most accurately describes the person or type of person I am talking about.

I call this kind of description “engagement specificity” — articulating the user’s mode of engagement by using the correct word to describe that engagement’s fundamental nature. This is basic English here: just use the right words at the right time, and don’t resort to buzzwords and catchy truisms. In other words, let’s simply try to write accurately and write well.

And besides, we already have the perfect word, and we use it every day in our informal conversations: It’s you.

The Second Person

When describing how to use something to a friend, you (there I did it) will usually say things like “You press the button on the top, then you slide your finger across the slider at the bottom” or “You enter your name and password in the upper left corner”. This is how we already talk about user experiences and indeed about almost anything descriptive, and it is an immensely empathetic manner of speaking. It is the linguistic manifestation of pure empathy: Me imagining what it’s like to be you, and describing my own knowledge through your eyes and actions, using (in literary terms) the second person perspective.

But the weird thing is that we hardly ever write this way, especially not professionally. In fact, in contemporary writing the second person is limited almost exclusively to Choose Your Own Adventure books. The construction has a juvenile, unsophisticated ring to it. It’s seen by many as overly informal, treating the reader a little too familiarly and casually.

But what if we wrote our documentation with the word “You” instead of all of those other euphemisms for users? A very compelling interface specification technique, suggested by Don Norman among others, is to write the user’s manual first: Document all the features as if you were writing the final instructions for the end user, then build the product described in this pre-emptive manual:

Want to know what designers of manuals should do? They should design and write the manual before the product is designed. Make the manual simple and elegant. Then insist that the designers build it the way they have described it. Then we might actually get usable products. and simple manuals.

The best designed products won’t even need manuals.

And why not take this method one step further: Before designing anything, write the product’s manual in the second person as if you were simply speaking informally to a friend about how to use the product, or describing how it works to a colleague or a family member?

I may try this on an upcoming project. Should be interesting, at least.

(Next User vs. Tron)

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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 suppose it’s as good a time as any to admit that I’m never going to read any Harry Potter books.

I’ve got nothing against the series, actually. I’m sure they’re fine books and I’m glad so many kids, and many adults, enjoy reading them. It’s just that I can’t imagine actually sitting down to read all seven books when there are so many other books I’ve been kicking myself to read for years, books of all sorts ranging from fiction classics to history to current tech. My backlog of “must reads” is hundreds of books long — do I really want to bump 7 rather large children’s books to the top of that list? I don’t think so.

Even when I’m an old man, I am certain that I’ll still have hundreds of books to read that will be more important to me than Harry Potter. Comrade Greenfield is in the same boat, telling the world on NPR that he, too, will never be interested in Pottermania.

Same, by the way, goes for the Potter movies. I saw the first one on cable and thought it was pretty dumb and even rather poorly made. The broom-riding sequences were hamfisted and dull when compared to similar scenes in Miyazaki’s delightful Kiki’s Delivery Service, made over a decade earlier. Anyway, I’ve got plenty of other films to see, mostly old but the occasional new blockbuster — I will, for example, see The Golden Compass.

Otherwise I am fully content to miss the boat on the whole Potter thing, and occasionally feel smug that all I needed to do was randomly browse my way to Wikipedia’s “List of deaths in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” page to learn, generally, everything one needs to know to be au courant with Potter lore.

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A few months ago during an intermission at the 2007 IA Summit, Christina Wodtke and Bill Wetherell accosted me in the hallway of the Las Vegas Flamingo hotel. The next thing I knew, Christina was interviewing me for a new series of Boxes and Arrows podcasts.

The 16-minute interview has just been published, and I’ve just finished listening to it. While I can barely handle hearing myself speak, I think you might find our discussion pretty interesting, especially if you want to know a little more about the challenges facing practicioners who want to head down the entrepreneur path or if you want to learn more about how Behavior came to be and what we’re up to. Enjoy!

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