That said, we’ve seen a few of what I call “sniper emails.” Those are the kinds of critiques where that individual, or troll, is just angry and wants to inflict the maximum amount of pain from far away. This person doesn’t know you and possibly hasn’t even really used your product. There is nothing valuable that you can extract from them–and that’s their point. No matter how thick your skin is, it does sting to have someone sucker punch your hard work.

However, there was one of these kinds of emails that ended up unintentionally giving me some excellent insight. He [the troll] basically told us what a huge let down the app was and that the other alarm apps were much, much better. He said our app wasn’t deserving of the attention that it was getting. The tone was cold and meant to simply strike us down. Normally, I hit delete and move on. But there was one line that stuck with me. He ended it with: “Don’t believe the hype.”

I didn’t catch it at first. But then after some thought I realized that that comment was insinuating that we had made this app without talking to anyone; we made it just sitting in our bubble. Then, we released it and were met with media praise. And from only that media feedback we continued to live in our bubble believing we had a great product.

He, of course, was dead wrong. The app was a labour of love. We built the kind of product we would like, without much expectation. Wherever I was, I’d ask someone to try it. I user tested at family gatherings, in airports, and waiting rooms. After iterating we reached out to some people online to beta test. They kindly took the time to review it and write feedback. It wasn’t all praise–there was confusion with some parts of the app. We learned from it and decided which points to address, keeping the focus on the simple product we set out to make. We continue to get feedback from users today and we listen. Closely.

Getting some attention is great, but attention doesn’t make a product great; being focused and having a clear vision of what you are making does. I think that believing the hype can be a dangerous thing in building a product and it does happen. Building it for real people and hearing what they have to say is what validates the hype. It’s great to get excited about a product or startup idea early on. You need to believe in it first, before anyone else does. That desire is what drives you. But be careful not to get to a place with it where you begin to have a “maserati problem.” This is basically creating your own internal hype about the product, when it’s not even close to being there.

The troll ended up giving me some great advice because he made me realize which kind of feedback matters. Reflecting on the responses, the feedback that is truly meaningful is an email from a real customer saying they love our alarm app and they can’t wait to go to sleep so they can wake up with it. Or, even someone fairly critiquing it and saying if we tweak something it would make it that much better of an app for them.

That is the kind of hype I choose to believe.

Some of the main criticisms I’ve seen so far are: 1) The Apple launches aren’t exciting anymore, 2) Apple is coasting with only incremental improvements (Here is a great parody video where Tim Cook releases “Nothing” to an audience applause), and finally, 3) We’re not only in a Post-PC world (that Apple kick started), we’re in a Post-Jobs world where the current product “innovation” from Apple is exhaust from his work.

I agree that most of what was shown yesterday is mostly incremental improvements, and that there is a lot of interesting momentum in other areas of technology (that Apple is not involved with… at least to this point). However, I don’t think that gives us the entire picture of what is going on.

Quest for Perfection

In the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” we follow Jiro Ono, an 85-year-old sushi master who owns a world-renowned 10-seat sushi restaurant in the basement of a Tokyo high-rise. He gets up every day with one goal: To create the perfect sushi. He leaves the restaurant each day, still not satisfied.

This obsession with perfection made me see the connection between the personalities of Jiro and Jobs. The other side of that is that they can be seen as nearly mad, consumed with their work and not having a strong family life.

Jiro’s eldest son is next in line to take over the restaurant. The problem is that no matter how good his son is, he has the legacy of his father to live up to. As one food critic in the film says: “Jiro’s son needs to be twice as good just to be equal!” See where I’m going with this?

Going forward, Apple certainly has a fight on their hands. But it’s not only because of outside competition; it’s a battle with the legacy of Jobs. Like Jiro’s son, they have to be twice as great as they were when Jobs was around, just to be considered decent.

As for their competitors, they have created hundreds of tablets and phones since the iPhone debut in 2007 and the iPad created the tablet category in 2010. There are only a handful of products that are finally coming close to what Apple introduced years ago (especially in tablets). I am not talking about specs here, because it’s easy to compare things in chart and say they both look capable of meeting a customer’s need.

That’s not the whole story. The Web traffic generated by the iPhone and iPad show us that the Apple devices are actually being used… a lot. Specs and sales matter. But that just tells us if a product has been purchased. A product loved and used all the time is quite another thing.

Copying Apple

It’s obvious that Apple is still doing something that causes consumers to desire their products and competitors to try any method they can to tap into it; even if it’s blatantly copying Apple. But that’s not the right way to copy them. Horace Dediu of Asymco says in an interview that there is a better way to copy Apple:

“When people ask me what should Samsung do, what should Nokia do, what should Microsoft do, and I tell them ‘Be more like Apple’, that doesn’t mean much. What I mean to say is, don’t copy their products, copy their way of making products. That’s very difficult, it turns out.”

Dediu goes on to conclude:

“It’s a simple formula in reality, I think, but one very few companies can do, either because they don’t have the patience, the confidence or the focus.”

Jobs built Apple. Apple lives his philosophies. Is that enough? Will the next amazing, disruptive product come from Apple? Who really knows. It’s quite possible that it won’t be from them. All I know is that if they continue to show up every day, striving for perfection and patiently focused on making great products, they will continue to be successful in some way or another.

We are in an era of planned obsolescence. Factories work feverishly to produce the latest hardware, with a human cost that we’ve inadvertently built in. And if you aren’t involved in a startup of some sort, then what are you doing with your life? The rewards seem within easy reach. Some are even investing in nothing—funding teams without a product in mind yet—in the slim chance it will actually become something. It’s the lottery for the technologically savvy—but if played right, whole industries can be redefined, and genuine value can be created for everyone.

Right now, many disruptive companies are just beginning their life. We look to startups because when corporations grow to a certain point, it’s hard for them to adapt to customers’ needs. With the Innovator’s Dilemma we find many established companies that reach the top of their game and then suddenly fall flat on their face; finding out the hard way that there is indeed a difference in drive for profit and growth versus creating value or meaning. They are unable to catch up with other companies that have embraced a market or technology that they never saw as profitable, and by proxy, a threat.

However, many startups pursue disruption and profit, only to find the same fate as their failed peers. Dave Kashen describes the process:

In the startup world, thousands of entrepreneurs focus their ingenuity on finding ways to make millions of dollars. They look for market inefficiencies and focus on questions like: “Will consumers pay for this?” without asking “Will this make people’s lives meaningfully better?” It’s not that we shouldn’t try to make money, it’s just that money should be merely one of many factors we strive for, and it’s played far too central a role for far too long.

Amy Hoy looks at the cost of burnout for those involved:

Every fucking time you see somebody using glory to hagiographize young men & women who are doing something clearly stupid, you must ask:

What is this raft of shit, and why are they trying to get me to paddle it?

And make no mistake, bartering away your “one and only youth” working 100-hour weeks on a web site for the promise of a big fat carrot on the end of a stick 80 million lines long, dangled by a fat statesm–venture capitalist, who will make 3x or 10x or 100x more than you, in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that you “succeed”… is clearly stupid.

With the explosion of aspirational “startup porn” like Pinterest and a continuous flow of new iThings, we have bought into the illusion—“artificially created demand”—that consuming products and rampant innovation is propelling us toward a better life. And creating digital wares is appealing because it seems like creating new jobs would be good for our economy—but digital landfills are problematic, too, with issues arising around archiving and longevity.

Even if there are young companies with meaningful intentions, not all investors are biting. They’re looking for ideas that fit existing trends, and they push for a quick exit via acquisition or further funding. Entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon explains:

The problem I encounter is that many of these “meaningful” startups have trouble raising money from VCs. An entrepreneur working on groundbreaking robot technology recently joked to me that he’d have an easier time raising money if his robots were virtual and existed only on Facebook.

The truth is, we may well be in the largest slowdown of technological growth in human history. Economist Tyler Cowen calls this the “great stagnation.” Take our modern-day kitchen, for example. The 19th-century kitchen was built around a live fireplace, but then we rapidly benefited from electricity, water, and gas stoves. Then the past fifty years brought no major technological changes.

Silicon Valley investor and web browser inventor Marc Andreessen famously said, “Software is eating the world.” He thinks our economy is being revolutionized by computing; our most favored jobs are shifting from the industrial age to the information age:

This is the great sweep of economic history. When the vast majority of the workforce was in agriculture, it was impossible to imagine what all those people would do if they didn’t have agricultural jobs. Then a hundred years later the vast majority of the workforce was in industrial jobs, and we were similarly blind: It was impossible to imagine what workers would do without those jobs.

Even if Andreessen’s prediction is right, our current technological trajectory is still far from perfect. From Cowen’s perspective, personal computing hasn’t broadly improved society’s standard of living. He says we’ve “plucked all the low-hanging fruit.” Today, innovation takes more effort. Some of the most successful technology companies haven’t done much for job growth: “Take the ubiquitous iPod. It’s created less than 14,000 jobs in the U.S., Internet giant Google, 20,000 employees, Twitter, a mere 300” (Author’s note: Cowen’s figures have obviously changed since that quote.) In fact, the net creation rate of jobs has been on the decline since the 1970’s.

We’re now faced with consumption-biased technological change: “technology that benefits mainly the highly skilled workers, but hurts the less-skilled, average person.” For those in information jobs, it’s an exciting time. Growth and jobs are plentiful. For those outside, though, their quality of life isn’t near as great, and it hasn’t improved much over the past few decades. The median income has stagnated, we’re mainly adding “McJobs” to the economy, and close to half of US is in a very fragile financial state—which is a “visible symptom of Great Depression–era level inequality.” We’re also seeing a “dumbification” of society, where media misinforms and more people seem to be aware of what’s happening on reality TV, than in reality.

Yet, exciting new products are released every day that promise to improve our lives. Are they fulfilling that promise? Are we? We make outlandish claims—like one brand of chewing gum will help you get a kiss from a beautiful woman—in order to differentiate. Umair Haque says this is an industrial age model of product creation: “We have to move from differentiation, to actually making a difference—to people, communities, and societies. Mattering in human terms. I think the key words, when it comes to making a difference, are: human potential.”

In short, if software is truly eating the world, then it needs to be more meaningful.

Cover image: Brent Knepper

In the battle against confusion we wrongly quote Einstein, or cite Hick’s law. We rattle off abstract statements, like: “lots of choices are bad”, “users today are demanding simplification”, “less is more”. User experience folk (myself included) proselytize for simplification in tweets and blog posts, with very little additional guidance.

It’s easy to sit back in your comfy Aeron chair, swiping around on your beautiful fruit company device and tell everyone how wrong they are with their kludgy, confusing products. The talking heads of the design world are great at these blanket statements and quotable nuggets of bullshit.

A product’s design is the culmination of many decisions, each with its own cost to the experience, as Jason Fried explains:

“Making something obvious has a cost. You can’t make everything obvious because you have limited resources. I’m not talking money—although that may be part of it too. I’m primarily talking screen real estate, attention span, comprehension, etc.

Making something obvious is expensive because it often means you have to make a whole bunch of other things less obvious. Obvious dominates and only one thing can truly dominate at a time. It may be worth it to make that one thing completely obvious, but it’s still expensive.”

There’s also the war that occurs outside of the interface, where you find yourself compromising with some people who probably shouldn’t be making these kinds of product design decisions — The kind of people that can seagull your beautiful app into Word ’97 within five minutes, because they just read an article about [insert hot tech startup, or buzzword, here]. It’s a tricky game.

The products that I see as perfect examples of simplicity are probably much different from those outside the design and tech industry. In fact, I think that it’s even likely they don’t have a true concept of simplicity, other than it means it’s easy to use or works how they think it should — note: people mix up usability and simplicity quite often, which are not the same end goals.

When I say “simple”, what I mean is: A product reduced to its purest form of purpose or value. In a comment on a great post by Oliver Reichenstein, I used the example of a knife:

“Comparing the UIs of Google+ to Facebook is like a well-balanced knife versus a cluttered kitchen full of gadgets you buy on TV to chop things up.”

Simple products can be more powerful than so called “easy to use”, shortcut, gimmicky products. Simple products are not overdesigned, and many might find them to appear limited or underdesigned. However, as in the example of the knife, a great chef can chop, dice, fillet, with a good knife. Where someone else might use it for much more rudimentary actions. Either way, it is an effective tool based on the user’s level of mastery.

For me, IA Writer is the perfect example of a simple application. It has been peeled back to its core purpose: Writing. I use it for authoring posts like this, taking notes on client calls, jotting down thoughts to save, and even to-do’s. There are apps built just as a to-do list, yet I find it to be just as effective, even though it was designed without task list creation as primary goal. Yes, it is very limited in comparison to other writing applications: No settings, one font, one text size. However, this limitation is a feature — and a valuable one at that.

The Four Strategies

It still amazes me how many people ask for simplicity but don’t realize this phase of the design has passed when they’ve already listed out what they want it to do, or in the case of a Website, tell you what needs to be on the homepage. Giles Colborne outlines the path to simplicity in his book, Simple and Usable.

It is one of the few books that I’ve found actually offers the practical advice on what it takes to simplify a product. As shown below, a remote is used in the book to illustrate some strategies to simplify.

“Simplicity isn’t something you can stick on top of a user interface”

There are many ways that you can simplify something, but Giles reduces (yes, simplifies) them down to four strategies, which I’ve extrapolated on to relate to interface design:

Remove: Get rid of anything that isn’t essential to the application. This could mean content, too; like the language you use in the navigation labels.

Organize: Arrange the elements of the interface so that they fit into logical chunks. This might mean based on a person’s mental model (how they think), or tie in to a more familiar interface pattern.

Hide: Place the most important elements within reach (make them obvious), and hide the others, making them accessible through navigation.

Displace: Pushing some of the functionality to another device, or feature, so that the one interface isn’t responsible for displaying every possible interaction.

Now, some of these strategies could be debated, or even stated a different way depending on what you are actually simplifying. If you were designing a car dashboard, organize would mean placing related controls in proximity to each other, or physically closer/further away from the driver based on the amount of use.

In some cases, remove could refer to ephemeralization. Timothy Blee defines it as “special-purpose products are replaced by software running on general-purpose computing devices”. We see this in the smartphone. In our pocket we have: a cell phone, camera, calculator, video games, movie player, and the list goes on. We’ve combined the functions of many devices and applications into one neat little package.

However, this doesn’t mean it is true simplification. There is a cost here, too. Take a look at any device and the numerous apps, and you can see it isn’t that simple to manage. Unfortunately the app model, has been infused with less purposeful creation, as seen in the so many one-off novelty apps running rampant.

Where Simplicity Starts

Ken Segall worked with Steve Jobs on the “Think Different” ad campaign and came up with the “i” thing (he talked Jobs out of calling the iMac the “MacMan“). He outlines Apple’s obsession with simplicity in his book, Insanely Simple:

“I met some smart people at Dell who realized things weren’t as they should be and wanted to change them, but they were incapable of changing the internal culture there. […] Some of those people end up leaving those companies because they get frustrated, others will stay as cogs in the machine. Apple survived because it embodies values that don’t seem to exist elsewhere.”

Who wouldn’t want to be a company like Apple right now? It’s one of the most popular subjects in product design and business for a reason. That reason is based on the results, not the process. Everyone wants to have a company that’s loved, has products that are desirable, and of course finds amazing success (and profits). But they copy the results, without understanding that the leaders of Apple treat simplicity as a religion. It took time and taste.

True simplicity starts at conception. It’s infused into the being of the creators, and by proxy, in the soul of every product they design.

Resources

Giles Colborne, “Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design”, New Riders, Sep 2010

Ken Segall, “Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success“, Portfolio Hardcover, April 2012

I wrote for a long time. Some things I was proud of, others… not so much. I learned what worked and what bombed. I found that the most successful pieces were the things that I would want to read, not just what I thought would be well-received. I carefully researched and reflected on what I wanted to say before even typing a single letter. I wrote hoping that more people would want to see content like that out there — that they would appreciate a thoughtful essay.

And, it happened.

After writing for a while I received an opportunity from an all around great guy in our community. He wanted me to edit a new section of his magazine. I had mixed feelings about it. I thought, “what the hell do I know about editing?” It has been one of the best things I’ve done.

My favorite part is meeting new writers. I honestly don’t care who they are “in the industry”: They are all fantastic. They bring article ideas that are always so insightful and valuable. They actually crave critiques and have all been very humble and gracious. I feel lucky to have a small part in the creation of the kind of blog posts that I admire.

Cennydd Bowles wrote a nice article that I think sums up some of the feelings I have about writing. In it, he says: “The best writers are inquisitive readers, just as the best designers are attentive users. We need only look at our terminology to see the parallels: “design vocabulary”, “design literacy”. So a good writer reads incessantly. Absorb different styles and approaches: quality, trash, everything.”

I have begun to fall in love with reading online again: From the welcome surge in longform essays, reflections on user experience, to thoughtful musings on technology and design. Reading pushes me to write better. Writing helps me to understand more about design and its place in the world.

Blogging, for me, is about making better things.

Note: Thanks to Chris Shiflett for the nudge to blog more. I will do my best.

The “Bimmers” (BMW) with their sporty and sleek profile, the Volvos with their boxy, safe and sturdy design. Every line, curve, and layer, has a purpose. It tells a story about that brand and what it stands for. However, a few of the car brands that the authors look at have a language that is more like the “Tower of Babel“¹:

“That model looks kind of like it’s pretending to be a BMW, and the one over there is almost an Acura. Another looks a bit like a Mercury, another Toyota-ish, another with shades of Lexus, and so on.”

Sound familiar? This immediately takes me to the period in our cellphone market history that I refer to as, B.I. (Before iPhone). Do you remember what that looked like? The design language for those phones said to me: “I just violently puked out buttons, colors, and features to see what sells.” Then along came the iPhone and the entire design language changed. Apple decided that the software was what mattered. As Mike Rundle said in his article, “Every Phone Looks Like the iPhone”:

“Your phone becomes the app that it’s running. How many people focus intently on the bezel around the screen while they’re using their phone? No one does. You stare at the screen. As technology advances and miniaturizes, everything will get faster and smaller. The hardware will fade away and software will be the only thing people care about.”

The point is not that other smartphones are copying, or have no choice but to implement designs similar to, Apple. I’m saying that the story they are telling about themselves, through their design, is not about them at all. They are talking like Apple does. In the design of these products and sometimes marketing, they are communicating the strengths of someone else’s design, not their own. It’s not a Tower of Babel, it’s a “Tower of Apple.” We all know that Apple’s design language is very calculated. So, the obvious problem with trying to follow someone else’s design language is that you don’t know exactly why you are saying it. And when they change it, the products that follow it lose what little meaning they have.

When you design a Website or application — product or service of any kind — you are telling people a variety of things. You are communicating what matters to you (or to your client). You are building the story that will evoke an emotional connection with a customer. Every page on your site is an “about page.” If it’s not, it should be.

People don’t want to buy from (or hire) some cold, empty machine. They don’t want a list of services or products that came from nowhere. They want something they can connect with. In the case of a car, the customer will identify with it, imagining driving it and showing it to their friends. It will become an extension of them and their personality. For example, if someone buys a new hybrid car, it likely reflects them and tells others that they care/are concerned about the environment.

Adrian van Hooydonk, is a Dutch designer who is credited with a lot of the design language for BMW starting with the 7 Series. He designed it for a specific kind of driver and extended this design across their other lines. Some of those design cues showed up in other car brands as a sort of trend. This obviously happens all the time in digital design.¹

Web/interface design trends explode into life overnight and spread like a wildfire. Using these cues is fine. We know everything is a remix of something that came before. But, before you begin to design, it’s important to understand what you are trying to communicate and what you are saying about yourself. Or, if you have an existing product or site, ask: What is this saying? You might not like the answer. If it’s a mixture of design languages creating a cacophony of gibberish, then it’s probably time to step back and build your own design language.

Further reading

This post was inspired by an earlier short essay I did and by a section in this book: 1. Robert Brunner, Stewart Emery, Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company, FT Press, 2008, pp.156-178.

These days it’s about the content. Design starts with the content. Language is the navigation. The interface is words. We’re advised to choose them carefully. Copywriting is now where the interface lives or perishes. We can’t trust those devious icons or that friendly, yet somewhat unclear language from the Web 2.0 days — we need to be clear and say exactly what we mean. The three most important things here are: Clarity, clarity, clarity.

“Nothing says Send Message, like the words “Send Message”. You can play with envelopes and arrows all you want. That’s not to say that icon-only interfaces are bad. They exchange initial clarity for long term beauty. It’s a choice you sometimes have to make.” — Des Traynor

With touchscreen, a lot of these rules change. The new applications I’ve seen hint at another (potential) stage of how our interfaces might act. One that stands out is Clear. It’s a to-do list app designed by Impending and Milen, with Realmac Software. Now, it’s not available yet, so I can only go by what I saw in the video — it’s all assumptions from this point on. It looks like much of the interface is gestures without labels or icons, lacking any sort of visual affordance. There could be an onboarding for it to help you understand what you can do, but we’ll have to see.

What I find interesting about this interface is that it breaks a lot of our current rules for interfaces. This is the type of interface that I imagine a usability expert would have nightmares about. But it looks fun as heck to use. There is an element of play (no, not “gamification”) going on here. Now, in the context of this application, it looks like this will work very well. The limited job this application does for you allows for the lack of language and icons to guide you. According to the designers, it appears their intention was to question many of the current rules of interface design:

“I think the important thing is to never take anything for granted and question everything — all the known interface design conventions, the clichés and rules of the genre. These are formulas, and to us formulas are just a fancy way of describing the rut you’re stuck in.” — Phill Ryu, in a Venture Beat interview.

The biggest problem with gestures is that they look fun to use, but aren’t always that great. Swinging your arms around like Tom Cruise in the future looks pretty damn cool, until gorilla arm sets in after doing that for an hour. The usability expert might point out that most users today wouldn’t know what the gestures are to navigate without being instructed. And Jakob Nielsen would be somewhat right.

But, I don’t think that’s who this is designed for… or, should I say, when this is designed for. This app feels like an app for the future. One where a toddler today, that has used an iPad her entire life, will be comfortable with it in the future. If some time traveling designer from Web 2.0 created the Clear app, the interface would likely feel very awkward and confining to this next generation of users.

I think it’s interesting to watch interfaces evolve. Especially moving from what we Web nerds call skeuomorphic interfaces. I don’t think our future is trying to manipulate “a picture under glass” of some physical looking thingy.

I understand that the gesture-based navigation for the Clear app is still a finger, swiping at things under glass. However, the playfulness and animated elements unraveling are very intriguing to me. It reveals something interesting happening with our interfaces. We’re just beginning to figure a lot of things out. As Wilson Miner so eloquently puts it in his Build talk:

“We’re not just making pretty interfaces. We’re actually in the process of making an environment where we’ll spend most of our time, for the rest of our lives. We’re the designers. We’re the builders. What do we want that environment to feel like? What do we want to feel like?” — Wilson Miner

The news was hard to avoid last night. The conjecture on the future of Apple without Jobs steering the ship will go on for longer than I care to pay attention.

This is the beginning of Steve Jobs’ departure. Apple will never be the same.

Most of the sentiment is that people are sad to hear the news and are taking the time to reflect on his career and his impact. However, there are a lot of folks reminding us that Apple, and the talented people there will still be making great things without Steve. As if to say, there are never any star players, it’s always a team effort.

I think that is a load of politically correct talk, and I disagree.

The influence of one person on many others is what makes change happen. Steve has influenced many tipping points. He’s taken us into the PC era and right up to the starting line of the post-PC era. Amazing.

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” — Dalai Lama XIV

Most have said that Steve’s greatest achievement is Apple. I do agree, Apple will continue to be great. However, for me, his greatest achievement remains in bringing more value to design. He was a CEO who sweats the details. One who cared about the yellow gradient in the “o” of a logo that wasn’t even his.

“I think back to the call I received from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning in January. It was a lesson I’ll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.” — Vic Gundotra

I personally attribute much of the growth and attention in user experience and design to Apple, under the guidance of Jobs. Without it, I’m sure it would have eventually grown, but not as exponentially as it has in recent years.

“My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to happen next year that’s going to change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away—you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.” — Steve Jobs

A lot of our work is in educating clients in what design can do for them. Helping them to understand that through listening to people and creating a great design, they not only can create a great product, but one that is actually meaningful to the person using it.

This is a tough problem, because we are not selling something in the package, neatly placed on the shelf. Essentially we are selling the road to get there. We are telling the client: “We’re going to take you on a journey, building the story of your product, and it will result in something great.”

From the client’s eyes, I can see why this is really a huge leap of faith.

A lot of that perception has changed through Steve Jobs over the years, being like that mosquito, making the business world notice what he was doing, and that design matters. Apple products give people (our clients) the vision of what a great product can be. One that is beautifully designed, simple to use, and powered by some sort of magic.

He also reminds me as a designer that great products don’t end at the design phase. The design phase never ends. It’s so easy to stop at the milestones set within a project, or, when it ships. This is where I think Apple really shined. They weren’t afraid to focus on making the core product fantastic, and as perfect as it could be, even though it would be limited. They were late to the game with a cell phone, but they were first to get it right.

Steve’s focus has always been on the experience, rather than the measureable specs that the technology media love to debate about. His reality distortion field has convinced many that there is something more special and desirable about an Apple product, versus a competitor’s — which in reality might have had better technical specs.

Since my first Apple IIc, I’ve been enamored by what Apple has done with products, marketing, and design. It’s been exciting to see the “one more thing” revealed each time. I appreciate what Jobs has done for Design, and fueling my passion for it.

So, for that, I thank you Mr. Jobs.

This is the latest in a long line of terms that will eventually spawn thousands of articles, hundreds of books, generate tons of debate within the industry — if it hasn’t done so already. Like every new movement within our community this one has its supporters and detractors. Although, the detractors seem to be few and far between.

Mediaqueri.es – The latest gallery focusing on “Responsive Web Designs”

I haven’t seen the perspective of RWD as much from a UX/design lens, although there have been a handful. We’ve lived with it for a while, tossed it around, written some how-to posts, tested out some things, and now have a gallery of examples (whether or not they are the “right” examples remains to be seen). It’s embedded into our industry and here to stay for a while.

The Circles of RWD

Most of the posts leave me quite confused as to what we are actually talking about and what RWD really means. I’ve tried to group the debates/perspectives for my own understanding. Let’s call them circles — it’s just how all the cool kids like to group things these days. I give you: The Circles of Responsive Web Design.

It’s an Approach
When the RWD made its world premiere it was positioned as a technique. The focus was around the complexity of designing content for the variety of screen sizes and resolutions. The goal of RWD is to deliver that same content to any web-enabled device and offer a fully functional experience without affecting the user — for example, resizing the browser, or, seeing only part of the site because it was designed for something larger.

In many ways RWD has always been around. The ability to create a fluid website didn’t just appear out of thin air recently. We are also used to native applications that adjust fluidly. But, that was when the desktop was huge (figuratively and literally). So, it makes sense that the expectation in this new world for our websites to follow the same pattern. For this circle it is essentially a push saying, “We know people are going to view this content in many different ways, so instead of trying to guess, or, build this site 15 times (and then every time something else comes along), let’s just build this sucker responsively.”¹

It’s a Philosophy
For this circle it’s like the next coming: RWD will save us from our fixed-width and “best viewed in [BrowserName]” sins. One of the biggest advocates of RWD, Jeffrey Zeldman says:

“… an evolutionary milestone in the development of web and interaction design as a practice and as an industry.”

This circle says it’s not just a tool, or technical approach. It’s a philosophy for anything related to web design. What do they mean by, anything? It means that it’s just how it is. It’s an inherent part of web design. Basically, when we create a website we shouldn’t be deciding if it should be a responsive site or not, it just will BE one. No question. If it’s unresponsive, well, as Andy Clarke says:

“[it] isn’t web design, it’s something else. If you don’t embrace the inherent fluidity of the web, you’re not a web designer, you’re something else. Web design is responsive design, Responsive Web Design is web design, done right.”

It’s a Trend
This circle feels that RWD is another passing trend and technical buzzword, and really doesn’t solve much of anything since it isn’t turning out to be the trumpeted savior that the second circle claims it to be.

The criticisms for it tend to fall on the technical side of things, as well as the practicality for businesses to implement it. It causes a rethinking of many things like the content framework and redesign effort. They also argue that technologies like @media-queries and javascript are still not consistently supported by many mobile browsers.

Although it’s still a very young approach/philosophy, this group is not too happy with it so far.

A Designer’s Perspective

Many discussions around RWD feel very technical. It’s not Responsive Web Building, it’s Responsive Web Design. Seeing a website perfectly on every screen is a beautiful idea. The easy design answer is “it depends” when talking about the usefulness of RWD. This is obviously the safe bet. So I will try to formulate my opinion without giving that same answer.

“But to be truly ‘responsive’? I believe that requires an understanding of the human on the other side of the screen, and, most importantly the context they are in.” — James Pearce

Native applications offer (arguably) a superior experience, because they are designed for that device, specifically. Delivering the same web app to every device is a usability nightmare. Interactions on various devices deserve their own considerations. We can get a lot of information about technically how the person is accessing the content, however we can’t see how they are interacting with it. Well, we can, but that would mean interacting with people *gasp*!

Each device has a form factor and falls into a different device class ². For example, with the television you might be leaning back and are 10-feet away, interacting using a remote.

“While it’s possible to have a single user interface work across more than one device class, developing a single interface that works across all device classes usually results in significant compromises or bare-bones experiences that don’t take advantage of what makes each device class excel (or conversely, rich experiences that fail to load/work on lower end devices).” — Luke Wroblewski

We know we should absolutely be designing for mobile. Although most people’s idea for that is creating something for the desktop, then tearing out some elements, rearranging some things and then calling it mobile ready. And, while we’re at it, what the heck does mobile mean these days? Most of us think of it as people on the move, or always being in distracting situations, however some data seems to contradict that, showing people comfortably at home ³:

- 93% of people use their smartphones at home
- 62% of people use their smartphones watching the tube
- 39% of people use their smartphones while poopin’

The iPad is mostly considered a “portable” device rather than a “mobile” device, since people don’t always have it with them. In many cases people expect the full experience, not cut down or reformatted to be a lean version.⁴

“It took the web community at large at least 10 years of making websites to realize that knowing something concrete about our users is pretty important. Why did we decide that we no longer need to have good data on users now that some browsers fit in our pockets and have touch screens instead of pointer devices?” — Matt Henry

There are obviously many things that need to be considered when deciding how to deliver an experience across the current digital landscape.

There Is No Silver Bullet

This is a very difficult problem we’re trying to solve. I know many people favor building from the content out. It’s true, that the content is king. If the content doesn’t matter, then how you build the website doesn’t either. It’s still not that black and white. There are many other factors like: Is the product/content even desirable? Is the company ready and able to deliver this vision of what we are designing? Is the customer willing to try out their new product/service instead of their current provider?

Image credit: Yiibu

Sometimes I feel like we (our industry) are like some sort of government that is out of touch with how the real people live. Having the best data plan and newest device isn’t everyones priority. We tend to prefer building for the latest devices like iPhone because we can really push things and explore the latest techniques. Even though in the mobile space the iPhone has a low penetration.⁵

Most people outside this industry don’t give a crap how we did it. Just give them the best way to buy their Farmville credits to plant more crops. I believe in the human factor and figuring out the context of how people are accessing the content they are interested in is what will make this an ongoing challenge. I don’t think there will ever be a silver bullet for designing things for people. We’ve been studying how people think much longer than the Web has been around. We know enough to know that we don’t know jack.

“Design is thinking about content and how to put it together. You need to focus on the whole. Layout does not equal design.” — Luke Wroblewski

The detractors can say RWD (or anything else) is a trend and will die. The other side of that coin is the proponents say this is the Holy Grail. Everyone hopes for the next savior of our troubles. The only solution that I can see is persistence and evolution, with a goal of great product experiences.

1) Mobile-first Responsive Web Design by Brad Frost

2) Networked Consumer Device Platforms by Luke Wroblewski

3) The Myth of Mobile Context

4) Five Lessons From a Year of Tablet Research

5) Rethinking the Mobile Web

In a nutshell, the concept he put forward is: Great designers adjust an existing work with little disruption of the foundational design for a goal or purpose. The end result is a modification to the design that improves the user experience. Good designers, on the other hand, recreate existing work focusing on the aesthetic, with a misunderstood notion that it will always improve it. However they end up disrupting and/or damaging the user’s experience making no real impact with the effort.¹

“Like a kid in a candy store, we creatives redesign like it’s the new black. Why do we possess such an insatiable desire to refresh and remake? Why do we thrive on renewal? What tempts us to be seduced by the sway of renaissance?” –- Cameron Moll

His idea that “good designers redesign, great designers realign” seemed to be embraced by many. I say seemed to, because not much has changed since that time. The redesign has continued as an incurable obsession and the realign is a forgotten buzzword of an earlier era. The redesign is the wonder drug of the Web: Bad experience with an app? Give it a new design. Don’t like how Craigslist works? Here’s a free redesign for you.

The redesign costs more than money. Just ask Gawker where roughly 50 percent of their audience went. As Andy Budd put it: “People expect the pain of losing something to be greater than the value gained from its replacement.”²

The Wrong Approach

If we were to dissect a typical website and list out the items of focus like a list of ingredients we would find a much different experience. Take for example a university site. There might be elements like: an alumni success story, events, latest news, link to schedule a tour, etc. Now if we contrast that with what a current or prospective student might actually be looking for, we get a completely different list of ingredients: campus address, application forms, campus map, etc. So, why are most university sites designed this way?³

Breakdown of a typical university Website by XKCD

We don’t just find this problem with university sites either. It affects many other sites for companies big and small. Ingredients like the marketing splash, or snippets of updates from their Twitter or Facebook, all take up a majority of the screen.

“The Walgreens site is an interesting example. One fifth of the visitors follow the “photo” link. 16% go to search. The third most important link is about refilling prescriptions. The fourth is the pharmacy link. The fifth most used links is finding the physical stores. Those five links add up to 59% of the total traffic …but those links take up just 3.8% of the page.” -– Jared Spool

A recent report by Jakob Neilsen echoes the quote above by Jared Spool. He talks about the use of screen real estate and how wasted it is most time on the elements that aren’t that important to the user. He found that even if the navigation was initially enticing, the users switched (once they discovered it) to the “slightly boring design for everyday, actual use.” Why? Because it was more useful to them than the “kind of cool” interface.

Jason Fried brought up an interesting point several years ago on the state of design when he showed the difference between the Google results for a site and the landing page of the site itself. His point was that you could clearly get to the items you needed to reach faster by using the Google results that cut to the essence of the Website.

This isn’t saying that having a site or application that is stripped of design down to links or bare content is the right answer. It says that our approach to design is simply wrong. So many organizations out there have trouble articulating who their audience segments are and understanding what those various groups really need. Their stakeholder wants run rampant without anything to balance them out. Forget about evaluating a site or app to understand what is actually not working or which specific things to fix.⁴

“One reason sites suck is that so many of us have forgotten why our sites exist. We get distracted, lose sight of priorities, and end up with sites that don’t do the most important things users want. Such a site is kind of like Swiss Army knife without the, um, knife.” -– Louis Rosenfeld

I can’t help but draw a connection here to the state of publishing and the reading experiences big media delivers versus Flipboard or Readability. They are so hung up on monetization, they have forgotten how to design a good reading experience. They obviously understand how to do it, since great (Web) design is many times influenced by print.

Comparison of Esquire print and web versions via Readability Blog

Most of the problems facing organizations that are doing a redesign could be avoided by approaching the design differently. This means focusing on the meaningful elements in the first place and setting up metrics to properly evaluate what needs to be fixed/improved later.⁴

The Never Ending Cycle

Being a creative first is tough because the first reaction to most new clients or products we see means dissecting it visually. We are immediately thinking what things we can improve without understanding the wants of the client or needs of the user. Designers have become enablers to the redesign. We helped to create this monster.

We complain about crowdsourced designs and spec work. But put a “bad” logo in front of us and we fall right into the trap of free work. Many designers feel the need to puff out their chest and show how talented they are by taking on well known Websites or applications and giving them a quick unsolicited redesign with zero insight. So, this is supposed to prove you understand design and UX better then they do? Really? If we want to be treated as professionals and seen as valuable, then this is not the way to do it.

Our exposure hours to the Websites and applications that we work on add up to weeks and months. For the user, it’s minutes or hours. Just when they get comfortable we pull the rug out from under them.⁵

“The mere exposure effect probably evolved to help early humanoids cope with their environment: they would like members of their own tribe and dislike outsiders, and they would feel more happy being on familiar territory than on foreign grounds. And they would prefer eating foods that they had seen before. All good survival instincts, and thus traits that were passed down the generations to us.” — Jakob Neilsen

The redesign disease is in full effect on the Web. It teaches us that it’s quick and painless, and we can always redesign our problems away. And the cycle of meaningless design continues.

It’s time to stop this madness. Realign it, or refine it. Focus and attack the high priority issues that will cause little disruption and improve on the experience. Set up ways to measure and diagnose specific problems. Yes, sometimes you really do have to make big changes, just understand why you are doing it. Fine tune the engine, don’t keep rebuilding it.

1) Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign by Cameron Moll

2) Website redesign: A design for strife on The Independent

3) Jared Spool: The Secret Lives of Links Notes by Jeremy Keith

4) Sweat the Important Things and The Redesign Must Die by Louis Rosenfeld

5) Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign by Jakob Neilsen