Designers often have to see further into the future than the rest of the world. Further in the future might just be a minute from now, not necessarily ten years from now. For example, a minute from now an elevator will have reached the seventy-fifth floor, and how will the interface change to tell a person where they are? If they get off the elevator on the wrong floor, is there an engineering solution that makes the elevator go back? Is there a way to recover from that mistake? Designers have to be in the future, and have to look into multiple futures simultaneously. That’s not easy to do.

read the interview

Ding! The sonorous ring of our victorian doorbell startles me out of my work induced stupor as I stare at my computer screen. As I open the door, a scruffy postman plops a heavy box in my arms. “What the heck is this?”, I wonder. With my keys I gouge at the layers of tape wrapped around the box, finally breaking one flap free to reveal the colorful cover of the new Smashing Book: Redesigning the Web.

Authors cherish this moment. You invest incalculable amounts of time toiling away at your keyboard, hoping that the end product will be interesting, educational, or at least entertaining. But it’s abstract work until you hear that bell, and the postman shows you what you’ve been doing for the past few months. It’s a book! And it’s a damned fine one at that!

It’s a treat to hold this book. Its thick, glossy cover is so vivid as are each of the carefully crafted pages nested inside. It’s heavy because the paper and ink that make up this beauty ain’t the cheep stuff. As you read through, the silky orange ribbon will safely guard your place. This is an object to behold.

Although I’m more than familiar with the chapter I contributed to this book, I’d not yet seen the contributions of the other authors, all of whom are mind-blowingly talented at their craft. Elliot Jay Stocks guides the reader into the book with a brief, yet elegant preface. Paul Boag sets the bar for the authors to follow with his usual whit and charm in a chapter entitled The Business Side of Redesign. Rachel Andrew, Ben Schwarz, David Storey, Lea Verou, and Christian Heilmann then gently guide the reader through the ins and outs of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Dmitry Fadeyev contributed a gem of a chapter on Techniques for Building Better User Experiences. Marc Edwards‘ chapter, Designing for the Future Using Photoshop, blew my mind with its lucid explanation of designing images that will look tack-sharp on any display, regardless of resolution. And Aral Balkan makes clear how we should be thinking about native and mobile web experiences. Finally, Stephen Hay and Andy Clarke wrap up the book by showing the reader a new way of thinking about web design. Hay challenges us to rethink our design workflow so that we can design future-friendly interfaces that will transcend time and platform. Clarke deftly caries the baton further showing us how responsive design changes not only the canvas we design within, but also how we talk and think about our work.

Despite being comprised of contributions from so many diverse authors, it reads as a well considered narrative, each topic dovetailing into the next as if sprung from one pen. It’s testament to the editing and direction of the folks behind this book. How fortunate am I to be a co-author of such a stunning book. I hope you’ll take some time to read it.

buy Redesign the Web

Son of Smashing Book

PS: There was so much great content contributed to this book, that it spawned a sibling. You’ll want to check out Smashing Book #3 1/3: The Extension as well!

Testing one user early in the project is better than testing fifty near the end.

@skrug

For every dollar a company invests to increase usability, it receives $10-$100 in benefits.

John Karat, IBM Research

Although his focus was on the Macintosh, Jobs wanted to create a consistent design language for all Apple products. So he set up a contest to choose a world-class designer who would be for Apple what Dieter Rams was for Braun. The project was code-names Snow White, not because of his preference for the color but because the products to be designed were code-named after the seven dwarfs. The Winner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German designer who was responsible for the look of Sony’s Trinitron televisions. Jobs flew to the Black Forest region of Bavaria to meet him and was impressed not only with Esslinger’s passion but also his spirited way of driving his Mercedes at more than one hundred miles per hour.

Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed that there should be a “born-in-America gene for Apple’s DNA” that would produce a “California global” look, inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sex appeal.” His guiding principle was “Form follows emotion”, a play on the familiar axiom that form follows function. He produced forty models of products to demonstrate the concept, and when JObs saw them he proclaimed, “Yes, this is it!” The Snow White look, which was adopted immediately for the Apple II c, featured white cases, tight rounded curves, and lines of thin grooves for both ventilation and decoration. Jobs offered Esslinger a contract on the condition that he move to California. They shook hands and , in Esslinger’s not-so-modest- words, “that handshake launched one of the most decisive collaborations in the history of industrial design.” Esslinger’s firm frogdesign, opened in Palo Alto in mid-1983 with a $1.2 million annual contract to work for Apple, and from then on every Apple product has included the proud declaration “Designed in California.”

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

When it came time to launch the iPhone, Jobs decided, as usual, to grant a magazine a special sneak preview. He called John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc., and began with his typical superlative: “This is the best thing we’ve ever done.” He wanted to give Time the exclusive, “but there’s nobody smart enough at Time to write it, so I’m going to give it to someone else.” Huey introduced him to Lev Grossman, a savvy technology writer (and novelist) at Time. In his piece Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made a lot of features more usable. “But that’s important. When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid, or not reading the manual or having too fat fingers… When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.

Pain is temporary, suck is forever.

Micheal B Johnson, Pixar

/ht @jmspool

give up your birthday for charity water

There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product. The problem is one of culture, training, and attitude of the people who make them. [...] We are deficient in our development process, not in our development tools.

Allen Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

In 2000, multinational oil company BP began a re-branding campaign aimed at positioning the company as a forward-thinking energy company that was actively pursuing a world “beyond petroleum.” A new green logo and a rush of TV commercials followed shortly after.

Critics found no shortage of fodder from BP’s campaign. The company was accused of “greenwashing” from the outset, and in 2010 the image of BP as an environmentally-sound alternative to other energy companies was shattered by the Deepwater Horizon spill — the largest of its kind in history.

What does this have to do with web design and development? A lot, according to Aarron Walter, UX design lead at MailChimp.

read the interview

Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

Jonathan Ive, from the book, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

What’s clear, and it’s been said before, is that there’s an opening for a new type of designer. Someone that understands interaction design, product design and can add character to things through behaviour. A light touch. Very subtle in order to make them believable – without them being too ridiculous.

Ben Bashford’s blog post entitled Emoticomp

It’s fascinating to think that personality could be the domain of a new type of designer that would understand psychology, interaction design, and could write with the skill of a novelist. It’s a strange intersection that this person would occupy.

In Bashford’s post, he suggests we start thinking about creating personas for the things we design.

Interaction designers are used to using personas (research based user archetypes) to describe the types of people that will use the thing they’re designing – their background, their needs and the like but I’m not sure if we’ve ever really explored the use of personas or character documentation to describe the product themselves. What does the object want? How does it feel about it? If it can sense its location and conditions how could that affect its behaviour? This kind of thing could be incredibly powerful and would allow us to develop principles for creating the finer details of the object’s behaviour.

That’s an idea I’ve been pondering for a while too, and discussed in my book. I call this design tool a Design Persona. Really fascinating to see other product designers moving in the same direction, and I’d love to see the idea evolve further.

We discovered in our design practice at MailChimp that the design persona was great for starting design concepts, but when it comes to formulating a detailed understanding of the voice of a product, we had to take things further. That’s why we created VoiceAndTone.com, a writing guide with emotion in mind.

• Learn About Design Personas
• About Voice and Tone

Listen to The Web Ahead, Episode 10

Why are some company’s websites more memorable than others? On the surface, it might seem to have to do with originality, visual impact and branding. But what if I were to tell you that the most important factor is how a site makes a visitor feel?

That’s the premise of a new book by Aaron Walter, the lead user-experience designer for Mail Chimp. Based on the title, Designing for Emotion could have been just another collection of pretty design samples embroidered with squishy commentary. Nothing could be further from the truth. Walter’s approach is direct, rigorous, at times scientific and filled with practical insight and humor. The book is part of the truly excellent A Book Apart series, and Mail Chimp, if you haven’t had a chance to use it, is easily the most pleasurable of the gazillion SAS email marketing platforms out there. So despite the title I found my finger ineluctably moving to the checkout button.

Read Kosner’s article on Forbes.com

Video of Learning to Love Humans Talk in Norway

A friend of mine has a new fireplace, and has struggled to learn the art to lighting a fire. The first year of our new fireplace was fraught with false starts, incessant relighting, and frustrating fire baby sitting to keep the flames alive. After a great deal of experimentation and some tutelage from friends, I’ve finally figured out how to light a fire with just one match and keep it going with little effort.

How Fires Work

Before you can master the art of fire building, you need to first understand how fire works. Fires need three very important things:

1. Fuel
2. Oxygen
3. A Spark

Okay, you probably knew that, but often people forget these important points in the heat of the moment (pun! groooan!). When you’re stacking up the kindling and wood, don’t forget to leave space so your fire can breath. You can’t just heep mounds of paper, kindling and wood. If a fire can’t breath, it can’t burn.

Here’s another important detail. Fire burns from light, combustable items to dense, less combustable items. There’s a term for this—transference. Place the highly combustable items on the bottom so it can burn up to transfer fire to the dense fuel above that burns longer. Remember, you’re moving fire from the match to paper to kindling to wood. Transference of the flame from one fuel to the next is the secret to lighting a fire.

You don’t need a ton of paper or kindling to start a fire. A little will do, with a couple of tricks up your sleeve.

Step 1: The Setup

Start building your fire by laying two large, split pieces of wood in a V formation with the point facing the back of the fire box. This will serve as the support for logs above while cradling combustable fuel inside the V. Dry oak, walnut, or other hard woods are best. Stay away from pine as it will coat your chimney with pine tar.

If you’ve burned a fire in your fireplace before, pull out all of the charcoal and partially burned wood and place it in the front of the fire box for use in step 4. This will be useful when getting the fire started as it’s dry and will create a sustained burn.

Step 2: Adding Paper

Add paper between the logs. Don’t over stuff it, and avoid using paper with full color ink. Never use things like pine cones indoors as they can coat your chimney with pine tar and cause chimney fires.

Step 3: Add Kindling or Fat Wood

Add kindling like small sticks, chips left over after chopping wood, or get a little fancier and use Fat Wood, small, natural sticks that burn hot and long enough to get your fire really going. I use just three small pieces of Fat Wood as my kindling. Nothing else is needed.

Step 4: Add Charcoal

If you do have some charcoal left in the firebox from your previous fire, add that to the next layer. It’ll catch fire easily from the kindling or Fat Wood below, and will put a sustained flame on the logs you’ll add above.

Step 5: Add Logs

Place two logs on top of the V formation, placing them parallel to the opening of the firebox. The V formation of logs below will act as the support for the top layer of logs and will keep them from falling in on the stack. Now you’ve got a combustable center of your fire stack surrounded by logs that will burn for a long time. Be sure to leave some space between the top two logs so the fire can get plenty of air.

Now you’re ready to light your fire. Strike a match, and light the paper in multiple places. Let the fire burn for a little while. When the logs are burning and the combustable center is running low on fuel, use some fire tongs to draw the bottom logs together, tightening the V formation and keeping the heat concentrated. As your fire continues to burn, you’ll develop a hot coal bed that will ignite any log you toss on instantly.

Now, go find yourself an adult beverage and warm those cold toes, my friend.