The craftsman’s eye

I often find myself looking at things that my dad made during his life, his joiner’s skills manifesting themselves in seemingly flawless dovetail joints and perfect angles, and outputs consistently fit for purpose.

The end is not nigh

Producing work that is deployed in a digital context brings with it a frustration, a yearning for a sense of completion where you know that something is simply done. This is something that has dogged me throughout my working life to date, whether I realised it or not. The quest for completion led me to acquire technical skills I never believed I would want or need, in what I now believe was the hope that they would bring me a clearer understanding of “finished”.

In short: I’m older now

What this drive for completion has meant for me is a quest for metrics, for data – measurable factors. In joinery, a glance through seasoned eyes can likely offer all the reassurance required to know it’s a job well done. Call it a search for meaning if you will, but moving deeper into UX thinking has brought me closer to the answer; knowing the right questions were asked, the right conclusions were reached and the right recommendations were made is as close as I believe I’m going to get. That sense of satisfaction is what drives me now – a far cry from the “cool” factor that motivated the younger me, an empty quest to mimic the latest ego-centric design trends.

So…

And yet, no matter what nostalgic gloss I might put on it, I am sure Dad would have been able to see in his work where improvements could have been made. It is both the blessing and the curse of the craftsman – the belief that the next project will be closer to elusive perfection that never comes.

A new word has been gradually creeping into the design industry lexicon. Designers should now, apparently, design for “delight” – and once again a word has been introduced without context into the forefront of design debate.

I’ve avoided ‘cool’ for most of my professional career. I don’t do ‘awesome’. I don’t trust it. I don’t strive for it. But I like ‘effective’. Effective I can work with.

The most rational, level-headed thoughts on this come from CX Partners’ Giles Colborne. The points Colborne makes illustrate that we don’t really know what we’re saying. It’s all too easy to drop these phrases into discourse, but it’s quite another to try and measure or define it. And yet invariably a section of the design community, certainly within web design, will regurgitate this type of commentary and broadcast it without questioning what it actually means.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment; I agree fully that ‘delight’ would be a.. um, delightful reaction for users of our work to have. But to impose this on an industry that strives for effective results appears to be imposing very shallow measures on a complex profession. If we’re going to propagate something meaningful, what about “design for success” – how’s that?

“Delight” is a meme and a millstone. It’s another way of saying that we should design something cool. But cool is not a commercial imperative, and it’s place in the process is undefinable. So, at what point should ‘delight’ appear? Until definitions and metrics emerge I will continue to hold such opinion at arm’s length.

There is no magic ingredient for a successfully designed product. There is only process and effort. As with cool, ‘delight’ will be a by-product of an effective outcome.

‘Delight’ happens, just as ‘cool’ happens, most often through rigorous attention to detail and a rock solid understanding of user requirements.

Apart from work itself, two industry events dominated last week for me. I was directly involved in one, but watched the other from afar with many others. As it transpired the two were not unrelated.

On Monday evening I was fortunate enough to co-host a session of RefreshBelfast with none other than Richard Weston under the title “There’s more than one way to design a cat”.

We managed to shoehorn all manner of issues under that banner, the central theme being that the middle ground of the design industry is a pretty vibrant and rewarding place to practice. We sang the praises of teams and organisations (versus the notion of the rockstar individual designer), and addressed the idea that vehement opinions put forward on the web as truisms are nothing more than that: opinions.

It was an enjoyable evening and one that we hope lived up to the standards set by previous speakers, including Jeremy Keith, The Creativity Hub and Design by Front.

Another key point Richard and I made was that no single point of view on techniques and processes is any more true than others simply because of how strongly the point is made, and attempts to dictate best practice to the wider industry is wrong. Unfortunately, that was the perception of many of an event in London later in the week.

The Responsive Summit – a tongue-in-cheek, self-aware moniker – riled a number of people on Twitter and beyond, apparently by bringing together a select group (‘select’ only in the sense that it was organised within a matter of days) to discuss the current hot topic of responsive design.

It is now almost two years since Ethan’s original post, yet RWD remains a grey area and continues to be difficult to implement on larger commercial projects. The idea behind Responsive Summit was nothing more sinister than trying to aggregate opinion on the challenges at hand and at least begin to plot a way forward. Knowing a couple of the personalities involved, I am confident that the aims of the session were true and will produce not diktats or imperatives, but something of practical benefit to our industry.

We need more honest and open discussion in this area. Early support for RWD was a touch absolutist in its fervour and more honest documentation of the difficulties in implementing RWD as a solution on large scale commercial projects is required. I believe this pragmatic viewpoint was reflected in the discussions during the day.

It may be that this one event will inspire many others either directly, or as a reaction against an unfortunate perception of ‘elitism’ surrounding it. Either way, this is what we need and positives will flow from it.

I am grateful for both of last week’s events, in different ways. Thank you to everyone involved.

—–

For more information on the background to Responsive Summit, see Chris Armstrong’s candid summary of the build up to the event on Storify.

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.

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.

“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

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.

Culverts? Cool.

The July selection for UX Bookclub Belfast was ‘How to Use Your Eyes’ by academic James Elkins. Each chapter delivers a brief but compelling insight into the expertise of others. By deconstructing amongst other things a culvert, an oil painting and the Periodic Table, the book reveals hidden mechanics and meanings, inspiring admiration for those whose contributions you might not otherwise consider.

Designers are experts too!

Had there been a chapter devoted to the makeup of a graphic user interface or how a web browser renders HTML no doubt most of us could have produced something that would draw similar admiring gasps from readers. But before we descend into a round of “woohoo!”s, “awright!”s and high fives, let’s remember that expertise is (or should be) the minimum price of entry to the Service Industry Club. The question to consider is: how do we communicate our knowledge?

It just works

Throughout the day almost everything we interact with or consume is the product of others’ technical mastery and this input is largely invisible, allowing us to go about our day without giving a second thought to theory, systems or manufacturing processes. Similarly when we consult with experts outside of work, be it a doctor or a car mechanic, we appreciate it when they frame any potential problems in simple terms.

Dumbing up

In UI design, and I’d suggest every other design discipline, expertise should manifest itself in simplicity. Certainly the science we incorporate into what we produce should be invisible to a non-expert. Further to this, we should be able to communicate our expertise and remain easily understood. Too often we are tripping over ourselves to prove our competence rather than communicate it effectively. Our ability blinds us. We should not berate the client for, as designers are so fond of saying, “not getting it”. Others do not see as we do.

Conclusion

So perhaps the truest test of our expertise is how simply it can be shared. When we discuss a project’s challenges with the client and more importantly what the solutions are, keep it simple. And sound like a true expert.

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.

People are liars (apparently)

The book being discussed was “100 Things Designers Should Know About People” by Susan Weinschenk. Compiled from a series of blog posts, “100 Things…” features some eyebrow-raising revelations on the apparent true needs of users, versus what people say they want. The book prompted a number of comments along the lines of “I’m a designer. I knew a lot of this stuff already… but I’m not sure how.”

Is there a designer in the house?

Professional practice in any number of design disciplines, graphic and UI among them, is not absolute, differentiating them from law, medicine or accounting for example. However design should not be subjective. The weakest possible position a designer can adopt in communicating with a client is a “just trust me, I know best” stance. Any sense of the designer-as-artist can result in needless, subjective discussions. In other words, either have a good reason for deploying a particular colour or prepare for a discussion over who’s favourite colour is best.

The appliance of science

One of the many positive developments to have occurred during my time as a professional is the proliferation of scientific thinking in the industry. The influence and contributions of thought leaders such as Donald Norman, Alan Cooper and others cannot be overstated; what they have brought to the table is a shift in rationale from the old, instinctive design sensibility to a more effective, quasi-scientific approach. So we have gone from arguing that a button with rounded corners simply “looks right” (instinctive) to stating that it has affordance and benefits from the Aesthetic-Usability Effect (scientific). What’s more, data supports the fact that attractive things work better.

That’s… logical, captain

Without question this type of approach demands more from the designer: craft, study, insight. It can also supply some much-needed constraints within which creativity can flourish, rather than relying on the artist’s muse. Arguing a point based on data and evidence is less likely to result in needless exchanges with a client over the amount of [insert client's favourite colour here]. That’s not to say it will never happen, but our position as professionals is strengthened when we can actively demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the rules of the game.

Reboot

We might assume to “know” so much gained from experience or absorbed from years of industry-related reading but regular reassessment of what we assume to be firm knowledge can only be healthy. Plus it is much more conducive to a sustained and successful career in design. Taking the opportunity has never been easier, with the web as a central hub for debates and discussions that lead to shifts in our industry and each of us with a front row seat.

Cliché, okay

Hackneyed it may be, but designers cannot afford to stop learning about the components of professional practice, particularly those of us who have had extended tenures in the field. Old thinking needs to be identified and regularly weeded out. We need to challenge accepted truths time and again, reassess our own subjective views and progress our work and contribution.

Gratuitous Star Wars quote

To paraphrase Yoda, we need to unlearn what we have learned – and then relearn it, sometimes daily.