Things I Like
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We weren’t — we aren’t — designing systems where an audience passively consumes our content, but are inviting them in to talk and share and push back and expand. More platforms means more places to publish; it also means more places to reach that community, more places for those discussions to happen, more opportunities for amazing connections to be made. And, alas, many more vectors for abuse.
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Le Guin can be polemical, prone to what one close friend calls “tirades” on questions she feels strongly about. I once watched her participate in a panel discussion on gender and literature at WisCon, an annual gathering of feminist science-fiction writers, readers, and academics in Madison, Wisconsin. Scowling like a snapping turtle, she sat waiting for illogical remarks, which she then gently but firmly tore to bits. Yet a conversation with Le Guin is often full of comic asides, laughter, and—a particularly Le Guin trait—good-natured snorts. Humor seems to be her way of taking the edge off the polemic, as well as an introvert’s channel of communication. Behind even the lightest remarks, one is aware of a keen intelligence and a lifetime of thought, held back for the purposes of casual conversation.
This piece, I don't know how to talk about it. It may be a season I'm going through right now, but reading about Le Guin's life, reading about her seasons of loneliness and pushing through, continuing to write, something about it resonated deeply. As I wade through my current season, feeling a bit lost in life, wondering where I should be heading, what I should be working on (work not necessarily meaning for pay), I'm going to hang on to the story of Le Guin. I'll be coming back to this piece again and again over the coming weeks as I try and figure out what I want to do, where I want to go, and who I want along for support and laughter.
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The modern journalist is not an expert on the web. They and their colleagues have spent a large part of the last twenty-five years dismissing the open web at every stage. They are not the people you can trust to either accurately assess the web or to make usable websites. You can’t even trust them to make sensible decisions about web strategy. Just look at their damn websites!
So much good stuff in this piece. And it's so true. The open web is here, the open web is amazing, and I love the web. (I just discovered this site and it's fantastic, added to my feed list immediately.)
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There are literally billions of people out there that rely on the work we do collectively. It’s our obligation to make sure that what we build is usable, accessible, and actually works. We have to build responsibly, proactively, and with empathy.
I agree with this, but at the same time, these articles keep having to be written and I'm sad that so many don't want to make a web for everyone, but rather for a privileged few.
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The wonderful thing is that “me” is always changing. Every day you’re a different you. So when you say, “It wasn’t for me,” maybe it’s not for the “me” right now—maybe it’s for the “me” in the future.
There are two things I like about this short post. The first is that it gives me a way to respond to the stream of things that people are telling me I need to watch, especially movies, which I don't do very much anymore. Second, we do change all the time. I often start a book and it doesn't click and I don't want to finish, so I put it on the shelf and it may be years before I pick it up again.
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Personally, I find progressive enhancement a sensible way to counteract any assumptions I might inadvertently make. Progressive enhancement increases the chances that the web site (or web app) I’m building is resilient to the kind of scenarios that I never would’ve predicted or anticipated.
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Is a developer building a new component and needs some styles? The UX Engineer writes that CSS. The UX Engineer gives a snippet of HTML to the developer for them to incorporate into the component. The UX engineer ensures the correct semantics and can come alongside the developer to ensure keyboard navigation works. The UX Engineer maintains a pattern library for the team to use as a reference to find existing styles.
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I will realize, only then, that she didn’t escape from China—the oldest daughter of a proud family of academics, married off to the son of a merchant in America; who walked miles and miles from her village to Toisaan carrying my father, eventually managing to get herself to Hong Kong; who boarded a plane to London and, unsure which plane was bound for Boston, followed two students to another flight that took her to New York; who spent a terrifying month at Ellis Island with my father; who was somehow, in this age before Facebook and cell phones and databases, found by my grandfather and brought back to Boston; who worked seven brutal days a week washing and steam-pressing the clothes of white, working-class families in North Cambridge; who bought a home and raised three children in that laundry; who, with the help of local resident Tip O’Neill, would gradually bring almost her entire family to America; who, when the laundry was sold, worked in a belt factory; who, by the time I was a child, seemed to know so many people on the streets of Boston’s Chinatown that I thought she was its mayor—for me to forgo the beef.
This is lovely, read it.
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This talk by Paul Lloyd from SmashingConf Freiburg is so fantastic. I really love it when people take other industries and history and relate it back to the web in some way. Paul does this with city planning and then moves to talking about design systems. It's really worth the watch and I'll be returning to it.
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But what about web development? I have found a code of ethics for software engineers , and maybe this is something taught as part of a CS degree, but for most self-taught web developers, I imagine they have never spent time looking into this. There are a few different bodies that put together codes of ethics for software engineers, but the very first bullet point listed on that Wikipedia article is: “Contribute to society and human well-being”.
Kristin is blogging again and I'm so excited. And she, like others in our industry, is asking some really good questions about how we think (or don't) about the things we make.
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Just as an architect can draw up the plans for a building that never gets built, a UX Designer can design a product that’s never built. In fact, roughly half of the projects I’ve worked on never shipped. Some were exercises in exploring new audiences where the business client decided there wasn’t a good fit yet. Some were situations where we discovered the complexity of the product put its price tag way above what the client wanted to spend. Some looked like fantastic ideas, but the users had zero interest in the products.
Design plus agile has always been an issue, and I completely agree with where Anne is coming from here. There is a lot of work to do before you even start to make the software as far as design goes. I can't wait to read part two of this, because I do have thoughts on how design can be done once you decided to build the thing and need to design as you build.
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Those tools are useful in the right context, but you need to be able to understand what that context is. Whenever you come across an issue that needs solving, think about what the underyling problem actually is. Only once you’ve identified that should you consider whether you might want to use a tool to help you address the problem, and which tool that might be.
Tim is being reasonable again and speaking to the realities of working on the web. I rarely follow the latest and greatest new tools and I'm more concerned with making things that work well for users rather than using a new tool in the process. I guess I can come across as a curmudgeon at times, but somehow I manage to continue making websites.
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Working in a stupefied firm often means blinding others with bullshit. A very effective way to get out of doing anything real is to rely on a flurry of management jargon. Develop strategies, generate business models, engage in thought leadership. This will get you off the hook of doing any actual work. It will also make you seem like you are at the cutting edge. When things go wrong, you can blame the fashionable management idea.
I can't even begin to tell you how much I've seen this in practice in my career. And it's sad that using your brain and asking questions in so many places is frowned upon.
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Being a beach lifestyle company, where our whole brand is wrapped up the notion of a healthy work-life balance, the idea that should be working differently, too, if we truly wanted to live differently, wasn't as much a leap. But if you ask me, we're more of an online marketing agency that happens to own a surf brand. There's no reason that virtually any company that employees a large chunk of knowledge workers can't cut its hours by 30% and still succeed.
I've been thinking for a long time about how we treat knowledge work like we treat factory work. Knowledge work doesn't just happen during work hours. I can't count the number of times I've been frustrated with a bug at the end of the work day and I stop working, move into the kitchen and start cooking, and within a half hour or hour I have a solution that I'm jotting down on paper to try in the morning. But we insist that work happens during a 9-5 work day, even though the vast majority of office workers aren't working that entire time. I wonder how much longer it will take to break this cycle and realize that many jobs can be done in far fewer hours.
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We all understand the joys of our always-wired world — the connections, the validations, the laughs, the porn, the info. I don’t want to deny any of them here. But we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, if we are even prepared to accept that there are costs. For the subtle snare of this new technology is that it lulls us into the belief that there are no downsides. It’s all just more of everything. Online life is simply layered on top of offline life. We can meet in person and text beforehand. We can eat together while checking our feeds. We can transform life into what the writer Sherry Turkle refers to as “life-mix.”
I found much of this piece intriguing, especially since I read it at the tail end of a vacation where I was as unplugged as possible. Also as someone who's studied theology and thought a lot about secularism and religion in my life, Sullivan's conclusions have me thinking a lot. I'm one of the people he refers to, I do yoga now and I meditate as part of it, it's my way of finding quiet. And walking with no device is in my routine as well. I wonder what would happen if more churches went back the simple, quiet customs of the past, rather than chasing after being just like the modern world.