Author: Rick Monro

Rick has led and managed design teams in agencies in Ireland, provided UX consultancy for both public and private sector clients and is currently Manager of UX Design at Contrast. He is also a syllabus consultant and lecturer for the Digital Marketing Institute and organiser of UX Belfast.

Categories
Community Design UX

Rockstars, preachers or craftsmen. Time to choose.

My father was a joiner, serving his apprenticeship in the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast. He took a simple pride in his work, going on to develop his skills in a number of construction firms across the city. I don’t believe he would have labelled himself a “craftsman” and I am confident that, while knowing no project he worked on would be complete without his contribution, he had a balanced sense of where that contribution sat in the greater scheme of things. We are fortunate to still have a couple of pieces of furniture that Dad made over the years as labours-of-love. They are simple, usable items.

Intense introspective

When I first read this recent blog post by Jon Tan it resonated hugely. His thoughtful appreciation of our industry is a heartening summary of how quickly things have changed and improved. On reflection though, should we subject ourselves to so much soul-searching based on moments of awkwardness in social situations? Should it matter what others’ perception of us is?

The drive towards a craft-based approach to design for the web continues to gain momentum, something worth fostering. Craft implies care, thoroughness. If we are to be craftsmen, we also need to accept that dedicated craftsmanship is often carried out in relative anonymity. Our contributions, if they are effective, will go unnoticed by most. Intuitive usability implies a lack of conscious effort on the part of the end user which, in turn, suggests a lack of acknowledgement on the part of the user.

My Dad ended his working life as a Clerk of Works. You may not be familiar with that role. I don’t believe Dad would have minded and would quite happily have explained his job to anyone. As our profession matures and we struggle with perceptions and interpretations of what we do, we should prepare for nothing but a muted response from those outside the industry or elsewhere in the design community.

We do great things, but they are not made any greater or lesser by how others perceive them.

You’re either with us or you’re against us

Elsewhere on the web, others appear keen to let us know exactly what defines us.

During his years in trade, Dad came into contact with engineers, architects and tradesmen of all kinds. He took an interest in them and how they contributed to projects. It informed his own work. To the best of my knowledge he never took it upon himself to accuse others of not being genuine joiners. As in all professions, he knew there are two types of practitioners: those who are effective, and those who are not.

I have written before of being proud to work in a profession that places effective practice over showboating. However there has been a trend of late for showy pronouncements suggesting what designers are or are not, depending on their approach. For example:

“…you’re not a web designer, you’re something else.”

“You’re not a user experience designer if…”

“A designer who does not write markup and css is not designing for the web, but drawing pictures.”

The defense for statements of this nature tends to be that they are intended to “provoke debate” or similar. I really wonder. Because sometimes, just sometimes, the intention appears to be to create divisions in our field where there are none; to create a ‘them and us’ based on approach and technique, rather than effectiveness of output.

A situation where a relatively small number of (I should state – exceptional) professionals, with the biggest platforms, who shout loudest feel empowered to define what we should or should not be is one that I’ll call unhelpful. Producing great work sets the best possible example to others in the profession. Sharing of the process gives something back to the community. Does proselytising really add any more value?

Future proof

We want to attract the best possible calibre of people into our industry. A clear sense of ourselves and what we contribute as UI and UX designers is crucial to that effort. Promotion of best practice, which is always changing, is a positive. There are suitable ways and means to do this. I suggest that haranguing those with a different perspective is not one of them.

Reading much of our internal debate of late, I cannot help but hear Dad’s voice and what he said to me in so many situations over the years:

“Just get on with it, son”.

I commend this sentiment to the industry.

——

Update: Following some particularly gracious feedback from Jon Tan, whose blog post is referenced here, I have edited the text of this piece to more accurately establish sources and targets for a number of points made. Thanks to Jon for his input. The original post has been retained for reference.

Categories
Community Design

Words fail us.

A recent exchange on Twitter, started by this tweet from Andy McMillan, brought attention to the use of self-deprecating terms by designers that may contribute to an overall lack of respect for – or awareness of – the discipline of web design. Andy also questioned what the responsibility of the design community should be in overcoming misconceptions.

I believe our industry dialogue has shortcomings that go beyond self insulting slang. How we choose to discuss our work amongst ourselves and how we communicate outwardly is directly linked to the fundamental credibility of our industry. And yet modern design discourse cannot manage to get much past “cool!” or “awesome!”.

Reading a blog post by a practitioner of say, the legal industry which began “Being a solicitor totally kicks butt!!” might reasonably lead you to think that something so crass reflects badly on the writer and, if it was a widely read site or journal, on the profession itself. But a recent design-related blog post I came across began precisely that way (substitute “designer” for “solicitor”). Names withheld to protect the innocent.

Our deficiency in apposite language is not always so overt. We have all seen design agency homepages that proudly pronounce something along the lines of: “We design cool web stuff for awesome clients”. Reading this you simply have to wonder – who is the target audience Vocabulary in the design world has become a series of memes. Phrases like “We’re passionate about creating awesome online experiences” suggest everything and nothing.

Try Googling the phrase “We’re passionate about design” and look at the number of results returned, or let me do it for you. Apologies if you find yourself in there. I don’t doubt for a second that each of those companies and individuals truly believe in what they are saying. However, if they also believed that making this statement created some kind of differentiator in the marketplace, they were clearly and painfully wrong.

Professional design bodies around the world, such as the very vibrant GDC in Canada or AIGA in the US, work extremely hard to bring credibility to the design profession by lobbying business and industry on the benefits of design supplied by accredited, licensed professionals. We rail against the idea of organisations producing substandard design work in-house, or roll our eyes when we hear that the boss’s nephew produced the company’s website because he had a copy of Dreamweaver.

And yet too many designers and design agencies insist on prioritising credibility with their peers over professional communication by adopting a witless “aren’t we cool?” approach to how they discuss and present their work. Do we really believe that clients are attracted to us by lambasting them with how “cool” or “awesome” we are?

The arrival of The Manual may represent a watershed, and the publication has very clearly set out its stall in terms of what it hopes to achieve. Similarly, New Adventures in Web Design has fired up debate of a nature that simply had not existed before. We should applaud these earnest efforts to usher in a new era of industry communication and hope they bear fruit. Further to that, the rest of us should make a contribution and start introducing maturity to the – at times – adolescent lexicon of design discourse, be it in our industry publications, on our blogs… even on Twitter. Or is that asking too much?

When we can communicate as accomplished and eloquent professionals, between ourselves as well as beyond our industry, then perhaps the boss’s nephew won’t get so much work.

Categories
Design

In other news, perfection remains elusive

Here is a hypothetical scenario which may or may not sound familiar to you: A project has progressed to the visual design stage. The process you followed fell somewhat short of textbook. Deadlines are imminent. The first iteration of a rendered design has gone to a client with various caveats:- that feedback is welcomed, that various aspects need to be reviewed, that the design can be progressed based on further discussion, etc. Then the word comes back:

“Looks fine. We’ll go with that”.

The question is: have you failed or succeeded?

Blind vision

As a professional you are almost certainly torn. You want to work towards the best possible result, ensuring the project is effective and represents something both you and the client can be proud for years to come. The craftsman in you wants to hone and improve. You had anticipated further debate, leading to the next iteration. Instead what you appear to have is approval. And the commercial imperative suggests that the time for iteration is past; the client has accepted your work and the process must move on.

The long wait

I suspect these are familiar dilemmas for design professionals. We hear much about the ‘perfect process’ in our industry writing and conferences. Professionalism calls for improvement; often arduous, incremental, glacial improvement that may only be measured in years rather than months. But it is a truism that perfection never arrives.

Reality slap

To remain commercially viable, relentless quests for perfection may have to be set aside for another day. Not, let’s be clear, abandoned completely: defeatism is the path to template-driven mundanity. Without question we should all aspire to better. However the harsh truth is – and you may want to brace yourself – compromise is a fact, in life and in business. Another element of professionalism is the maturity to accept that fact, while knowing that you are still a credible member of the design community despite falling short of perfection.

Conclusion

The lesson from a scenario such as this is almost certainly that we should not present anything to a client that we are not prepared to stand by 100%, or indeed go live with. It can be all too easy to sleepwalk your way to a design that doesn’t represent you or the client particularly well. #speakingfromexperience

Categories
Process

Small viewports… and the death of the fold

Like all the best/worst B-movies, the bad guy you thought was dead and gone has summoned up his last ounce of strength for one last attack. The Fold is back. With a twist.

A short debate

The debate about whether a ‘fold’ exists on the web begins and ends with the following assertions: yes, content goes off-screen in the majority of websites and yes, users are willing to scroll to read it. Period. Note that the second point doesn’t dispense with the need for clients and designers to assign priorities within content and for the designer to create a visual hierarchy based on these priorities. These are crucial conversations in any project. And this is the very area where things are going to get interesting.

Top of the (content) pops

The current mobilisation towards responsive design is laudable, and a great many people are currently wrestling the theory towards best practice. Despite what may be pronounced from various sources across the web, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution for myriad viewport sizes. What we will likely emerge with is a toolbox of approaches for use in a variety of contexts, of which responsive design will be just one. But what ‘responsive’ highlights very effectively, in a way that designing for desktop does not, is the relative priority of content as the viewport shrinks.

Top=good, bottom=bad

Laying out web content for a desktop PC or laptop provides plenty of screen real estate to play with. We can cheat the hierarchy by placing something somewhere else in a vast 960 x [whatever] pixel canvas and create visual priorities through the use of colour, space etc. We can design within grids and columns that allow pretty much everything to get a look in. Whatever sits further down the page is somewhat less important and everything that sits towards the top of the page is more important. But this is far from the absolute scale that we are going to need.

Extreme content. Dude.

For a responsive approach we need to decide on absolute priority, not a vague, general hierarchy. A glance at any of the new breed of responsive sites on a mobile device tells you one thing: the content has a no-nonsense, top-to-bottom hierarchy. This kind of extreme prioritisation is going to form part of the new normal in designing for the web. The conversations right at the outset of the design process will need to address this. “If the user could only see one part of the site, what would it be?” is as basic a question as can be asked but it has tremendous resonance now.

All change

Further, if we are now giving something lowest priority and it will require a significant amount of swiping or scrolling to get to… is it really required at all? And if that element is removed, what about the content which is now at the bottom? These issues have massive potential to skew how we assess content and it is barely credible that the now ‘traditional’ website we have grown so accustomed to will not be affected by these shifts.

It’s what thumbs are for

And what of the fold? The old arguments used to go that if the fold existed, everything needed to be forced into the area above it for fear of users missing it. By the same logic, on a 320 x 480 viewport the user is going to miss… pretty much everything. The same logic would also suggest that those users won’t know to swipe to see more. Except we know that they will.

Web origami

The fact is there is no longer even a single fold. On a small device there are multiple folds, multiple screens to scroll through. But bizarrely the more folds exist the less they matter. Users now expect to swipe and to scroll. So sleep easy and let it be known: the fold is dead.

Categories
Design Process

Late nights, passion and the creativity myth

My first professional job was in a small advertising agency. Despite knowing many fine people there who have gone on to great careers elsewhere, for a graduate designer it was, put simply, a sweatshop.

Working there taught me two important things:

1) I had to get out of advertising as soon as I could
2) Routinely working long hours reduces quality, productivity and creativity

During my time there I was involved in numerous pitches for advertising accounts that were poorly planned and executed, more often than not resulting in failure. Each had another common characteristic: a reliance on working late into the night.

Time would invariably be wasted on various approaches with no structure or purpose until with little time left, the Creative Director would pipe up dramatically “I’ve got it!”. We’d then throw the kitchen sink at it, working excessively late or over the weekend as though it were proof of creativity and commitment. It wasn’t. It was proof of poor planning and a lack of creativity.

I don’t mean to generalise; of course like all aspects of design, well practiced advertising has its best practice processes and systems. Similarly working late to finish a project based on agreed milestones and deadlines goes with the territory.

However when company culture relies on sapping the energies of junior staff members in the name of creativity then there is a problem. The agency I cut my teeth with was all about the creativity myth. The myth that says if you work late enough and throw enough time at it, great creativity will simply happen.

An over-reliance on “passion” in the marketing lexicon of design agencies further fuels the fallacy. Regardless of the intent, what something like “we’re passionate about design” says at best is that “we will work long into the night for you”. As a client I don’t think I would care how much of a flurry you whip up due to your passion, or how many all-nighters you are prepared to pull. It’s results that count. To paraphrase Joe Rinaldo, what’s the ROI on passion?

Time and again it has been proved that effective results come from careful planning, iteration and craft. Otherwise known as professionalism. Yes, you can work round the clock on a labour of love. We all do it. Can you do it on a number of projects in a row? Yes, you can. Can you sustain that pace and a reliance on late hours over a number of years, over a career? You can if you are prepared to have nothing else of value in your life.

Waiting for the creative director’s faux inspiration wasn’t for me. Despite being completely new to the workplace, I could see that it was an ineffective way of working. Although I didn’t know it at the time I was crying out for process, order and sanity.

Happily UI design provides just that, and I am proud to be working now in a discipline that increasingly values a systematic process over flamboyant showboating.