Anyway I won’t get into the how, because if you don’t know it is probably too complex of a solution to learn for this purpose, but if you are already using source control, might be a quick and easy trick to help you out.

So where does all this disappointment come from? I am glad you asked. I am a member of the community Forrst (http://www.forrst.com), which is a community where designers and developers share snaps (pictures), links, code snippets and questions. It is a great community, I highly advise signing up for an invite for anyone in the design/development industry. This rant is not specifically against forrst users, just my point is well illustrated in a conversation that has been going on there. First off some Forrst basics. People post items (images, code, questions, links) and other members can “like” an item and/or leave a comment. This isn’t new to Forrst, this is like Facebook or Digg or any of the 1001 other sites on the internet. Unlike those other sites, the purpose of Forrst is to get critique. So someone suggested we had a dislike button, something I strongly support (also on Facebook and Digg), and apparently I have discovered I am clearly in the minority. Now I have no problem with Forrst not adding a feature that they think would hurt the community, infact I think it is extremely responsible for the owners/creators to understand their users and create a system that functions how they function, what I am actually saddened by is the users themselves. The arguments for the lack of a dislike button appear to be as follows:

• People will just dislike an item and not comment on it which is useless feedback
• People will dislike things just to be mean
• Novice designers/developers will be discouraged by too many negative votes and not continue to learn

Now what makes me sad is that I think every single one of those things is wrong, sad and an obvious deficiency in our community. The fact that we are so self important that we think that people owe us their time for length comments, so childish we would dislike things out of jealousy or so fragile that negative feedback would stop us on our journey to become better is absolutely ludicrous.

Any Lovin is a Good Lovin

Anyone who takes time, even one second, out of their day to help me with critique, suggestions, comments, answers, whatever… is doing me a favor. Whether that be liking, disliking, commenting, taking screenshots of and marking up, branching my code and making changes and sending them back… whatever it may be. I will bend over and kiss each one of their asses as they are doing something for me out of the goodness of their heart. They have decided to busy their brain with my passion/problems/work, if for even 1 milisecond, I should be thankful as they owe me nothing. The audacity I have of making my ego easily puffed by with a single click of a button, but requiring those who don’t agree with me to have to spend more time to express their opinion seems as though I have no interest in obtaining negative feedback. Are comments better then votes? You bet your ass they are, they are way more descriptive and helpful, however why then can I just as easily give praise with a single click? Does that mean the praise is worthless? I am not so high as to think that any spec of help I get from others isn’t valuable and I will thank them for it every day with my whole heart.

Promoting Mediocrity and Fear of Bullies

Why do we continue to allow people to create mediocre shit and tell them it is awesome? If something sucks, I say mark it as so. You can only get better by understand the flaws in what you do. I think there are extremely tactful ways to provide negative feedback without “hurting someone’s feelings”, and to be honest I hope it hurts their feelings, that means they were passionate about what they did and only put it out when they thought it was the best they could do. That is the guy I want to work with. If he has any sort of smarts, he will realize at no point in your life will you ever be better then everyone else in the world at everything. So even if I put out my best work that I am super proud of and you tell me it is shit, at least I know how much my radar is off. If there ends up being people that are assholes and just vote things down out of jealousy or anger, their votes will most likely be lost in the averages as well as the community will weed out the garbage as it grows. You don’t get paid to give your opinion so why would someone waste their time being mean or shitty if they didn’t get a reward?

Crying Over Spilled Milk

If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen. You can’t ask for feedback and expect to only receive glowing reviews. First off that is unrealistic and useless. I am not sure how a person would be so discouraged by bad votes, but would however not be discouraged by critical feedback comments, but that is a whole other issue. We contribute in feedback communities to make each other better people, not to blow smoke up each other’s asses.

So there ends my rant. In reality, whether Forrst ends up having a dislike button or not it is irrelevant. My insight into some of my peers thought process on feedback has certainly been an eye opening experience and if anything I guess I can say I am greatful for that.

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I am not going to talk about systems here. Feedback processes are religion. Some people like very open systems like email where you can write whatever you want, others like forms with 100 fields asking everything down to your underwear size and blood type. The process at which you obtain feedback is going to vary depending on your project and preference. What I am talking here is the thought put into what you say in those emails or problem descriptions… the content itself.

The Three Whats

Sick of getting requests like “when I click on the link, it doesn’t work” or “I want a pop up to show me the picture”. Reports and requests like this are useless. Not only do they lack reference of what you are talking about, but they lack reference as to what they are supposed to do. When I am working with a client who needs to give me feedback about a web page I designed or an app I coded I ask them to answer the three whats:

• What were you doing (bug) / what will you be doing (feature)
• What did you expect to happen (bug) / what do you want to happen (feature)
• What actually happens (bug) / what currently happens (feature)

With these there pieces of information I can extract a lot of information.

What were you doing (bug) / what will you be doing (feature)

This gives a frame of reference under which something can be reproduced. Where on the site or what functionality they were utilizing on the app. This fundamentally puts us on the same page so discussion/discovery can begin. It is important here to be as detailed as possible. For example “I was on the homepage clicking on the navigation link about us” is good, but “I was on my Windows 7 machine using IE8 clicking on the about us link in the footer navigation on the page http://website.com/index.html” is MUCH BETTER. While some of that information may be irrelevant, such as it may not be a browser or OS specific bug, providing more information is always better then less as I am not left wondering what were the exact circumstance and where the client was looking.

I ask my clients to send me the following info:

• What operating system
• What browser flavor and version
• What URL where you on
• What functionality where you doing (clicking/scrolling/submitting) and on what was it that you were doing it.

What did you expect to happen (bug) / what do you want to happen (feature)

This is key. You would be surprised by how many bug requests are actually just a misunderstanding of how something works and the page or app works fine, just the client was expecting something else. While this is a bit redundant on things like popup errors (you will get a lot of “I expected it not to crash the browser” or “I expected it not to have a JavaScript error”, it is best to just get your clients in the habit of letting you know what they thought should happen. In the case of a feature this should probably be the beginning of a requirements doc.

What actually happens (bug) / what currently happens (feature)

This is the technical meat. Identifying what needs to be changed or what went wrong. Again it is best to be as descriptive as possible. Error messages, screen shots, log files anything and everything that may help the developer/designer narrow down the problem.  The more I get up front the less I have to go back to the client asking for more details. The one minute you take to gather the details while the bug is happening now, will save many minutes later when your developer calls you and asks you to “replicate the problem” and you have to go track the problem down or “go find that screen where you want that link”.

I ask my clients to give me any/all of these:

• Screen shot of what they are seeing
• Any error messages they are getting
• Error Log/Dump/Crash log of problem
• Description of current functionality that would need to be modified for new functionality such as new navigation or layout

Using the information obtained by these three questions I rarely have to spend much time doing a back and forth with the clients looking for more information or have the inability to replicate the problem or visualize the feature (which of course most times requires more work such as a full feature spec, but I at least am in the same place as the client to start discussion).

Got any tips or suggestions? Let me know in the comments!

Moral of the story, check your privacy settings for things you don’t want “out there” and don’t do stupid things in public if you don’t want them document them and if you don’t like how someone is using your information, leave the service, don’t complain about it. Actions are louder then words. Let the rest of us who aren’t doing embarrassing/shameful things, or who don’t mind that we do so, take advantage of all the functionality something like Buzz or Street View offers.

No one is making you use any of this. If you don’t like it quit.

Most conferences have to appeal to a large group of people to sell tickets to pay for the cost of renting space/insurance/etc, but since obviously an online conference doesn’t have those costs, Think Vitamin had the freedom to choose a very specific topic, in this case CSS3 and in the future HTML5 (already signed up!) and create tracks specifically based on this smaller topics knowing that the lack of travel would attract/enable enough people and the best speakers on the topic. The output? Amazing content from the industry leaders on a specific topic. I learned/was inspired about CSS3 10 times more then I was in the 3 CSS3 speeches I attended at SXSW. Partly this is just due to the fact that I wasn’t hung over and wasn’t worries about planning which other tracks and what I needed to go with next and where I needed to meet my friends… or where I checked in on Gowalla This isn’t SXSW fault, but anything in meat space is infinitely more complicated from an attendee perspective. Online you can get yourself a cup of coffee, you can cough, you can answer the phone if need be, etc. Complete freedom all the while being able to attend.

On this same line, it seems we got the pick of the litter in terms of speakers as I imagine them also being in their PJs in their hometowns with their families is way more an attractive option then flying around the globe, living in hotels and getting dressed up for a single hours worth of work. This level of comfort was obviously attractive to the speakers who many were also fresh off the SXSW/Mix train as well…   like Andy Clarke who decided to have a cigarette in the middle of his presentation. Not that I condone smoking, but why not? Wasn’t going to bother me as a nonsmoker… I am like 10,000 miles away. Andy felt more comfortable and I am sure were got a better presentation because of it.

So quick review, conference started at 1pm EST with Molly Holzschlag going over CSS3 layout options and where they stand in development and support of browsers. Next the Squared Eye guys, Matthew Smith & Sean Gaffney, talked about typography in CSS3… this time being able to finish their presentation without an alarm evacuating the building (Poor Matt Smith’s speech at SXSW was interrupted only a week early). Next up we had Andy Clark going over CSS3 best practices and careful degradation and finished up with Jina Bolton talking about CSS3 visual effects.  Each was a fantastic speech and specific enough to feel like I learned something without being yet another walkthrough of “cool things CSS3 promises”.

The conference cost 150 dollars to attend and there were about 200 attendees.  Even if many of them got the student discount, Think Vtiamin walked away with 20k with their only expenses being WebEx and paying speakers. Now I don’t know the going rate of SXSW or what WebEx costs, but I imagine that per hour investment (work to create presentations and actually give speech), I bet this conference was more lucrative to the speakers and creators then most, something that I hope will entice more people to do online conferences for a lot of different topics.

So thus far all good right? Well there were a couple of drawbacks and a couple of things I would change, fortunately all little and all things that may adjust once “we” get the hang of this online conference thing. There were some sound issues with getting people setup and normalized (definitely just something that needs to be ironed out), the webex system would have been great if it was more integrated in terms of collecting links or not trying to take over my whole screen during speeches and having to switch back and forth to chat. We figured out a work around, but each speech we had to go in and change the apps settings. Lastly the recording only being one long recording is annoying. I wish it was broken down per speech.

I will be attending SXSW next year. This doesn’t replace the social interaction and idea building you get when you meet with your colleagues, I don’t think it is trying. But monthly conferences like will enable me to keep on top of new and changing technologies as well as keep me inspired to learn and create. If I can sit here in my Baltimore suburb in my PJs with my cat on my lapt and still be inspired I will gladly hand over 150 a month to be educated and inspired.

Got up, headed down and grabbed some coffee and walked to the convention center (about 3 blocks from my hotel) in the rain to the convention center. Needless to say I arrived very wet and cold.

First presentation for the day was “Nobody Likes a Prototype” on how you can use different methods like light HTML/commercial style tricks that you can use to create prototypes that will sell your ideas. #PrototypingWebApps

On next to “Dashboard Design: Why your baby is Ugly”. Interesting speech about not using the same old visualizations and how to pack in the most in the space you have without over complicating it. Couple little hints I picked up on that I hope will make some good visualizations such as highlighting any major data issues versus letting the users find it, pie charts are a complete waste and using census data to test. #WhyBabyisUgly

After that “Getting Better: The Designer’s Path From Good To Great”. This was my favorite presentation in all of SXSW. I am going to blog about this separately, so I won’t get into too much detail, but it was inspiring and really hit home for me in terms of things I can/will do to change my goals and career path. #GettingBetter

Then we had lunch at PF Changs and let Mikey go shopping for more schwag.

Headed upstairs int he Austin convention center to the Twitter 140 Conference however I think we misinterpreted what it would be and thought it was more twitters influence on the topics then the topics in a short 20 minute (twitteresque) format. Not to say they were bad, but they were pretty repetitive so we booked out early.

Headed back home to the hotel and napped for 2 hours due to sheer exhastion. Woke up and headed to the Iron Cactus to enjoy our last night and some home made Guac (my favorite thing about SXSW).Walked over to the Mashable party and met some cool people while waiting in line. Party was pretty decent, but we had an early flight so we left about 1am.

Back to the hotel for some packing, a movie and a lot of sleep.

Overall awesome SXSW. I can’t wait for next year! Someone definitely needs to do quarterly meetups.

Didn’t make it to my first two panels… getting out of bed was too painful so I just took it slow.

Headed over the to conference to attend the 11 o’clock Gary Vaynerchuk speech. Although I can’t actually tell you what the speech was about, it was inspiring as all Gary’s stuff is. #RefreshGary

Next I stayed in the same room to watch the Evan Williams keynote simulcast. I am so glad I wasn’t in the live room because OMG how crap it was. I was glad noone was around so we could speak freely about how shit it was. This is not a reflection on Evan at all, but the interviewer Umair Haque seemed as though he was more interested in listening to himself talk. Anyway… Evan announced the upcoming @Anywhere platform. Looks pretty cool… integrates twitter conversation into web sites. #EvanWilliams

Next I headed to the trade show floor which was pretty crap and I bailed after 5 minutes.

Headed back to the hotel for a nice rest and clean up a bit.

At 6pm we headed over to Austin on Rails at Buffalo Billards. Dan got to hang out with “his peeps” while Mikey and I took advantage of the free drink coupons and scored ourselves some of the Black Otherinbox shirts (way nicer then the tan ones IMO).

After that we wandered down to the Gowalla party (<3 Gowalla) and ended up waiting in line for an hour and 15 minutes ONLY to get rained on and leave about 30 minutes after getting in. Did score a nice Gowalla tshirt and some gowalla stickers so all was not lost.

Headed back to the hotel at about 10 to get Dan and Mikey some warmer gear and we decided to just stick around locally and ended up at the Paradise bar.

Another day done… 1 more left. I will be sad when it is over, but I am looking forward to sleeping in my bed.

Head over to the conference hall to catch the 2:00 speech called Your Design Process is Killing You. Got there and there was a line. Decided to sit outside and wait and watched people leaving in droves…. decided it wasn’t worth it. Spent some time working on some requirements for my new project.

Mikey picked the next speech and we headed to It’s Time to Save the World with Design Thinking. To be honest it wasn’t what I would have chosen, but I was pleasantly surprised. As opposed to a speech it was a core conversations so all the attendees contributed… which was a good and bad thing. Glad I went, was a new experience. #SaveTheWorld

Wandering the hallways I ran into my friend Mark Krysnky who gave me a tip on there might be some discussion about Buzz at the gmail speech, so we headed down there. Unfortunately A LOT of people heard that tip and the place was packed (seriously SXSW why use small rooms if you have big ones available?!?!). Ended up drinking some coffee and working on more requirements.

Headed back to the room and got my camera and snapped some pics from the Omni roof. (Will post later).

Headed to Chupacabra’s to grab some dinner and a margarita. Good…. not as good as the Iron Cactus, but still good. Mikey made some new friends and we headed over to the Mashable party to check the line. VERY VERY VERY long.

We decided instead to head over to the Blip.TV party. Long story short, we got lost, ended up following some guy to his room in a hotel. Sorry random guy!

Made it to the Blip.TV party. IMO it was a total bust, although I think Mikey liked it. Seemed very markety… people not talking about what they have done or created but more name dropping… just not my thing.

Got a message from Gary Vaynerchuck about his not so secret wine party and headed around the block to check it out. More my sort of people, lots of devs and personalities I recognized, good music, way better drinks. Dan, Mikey and I worked our way to the couch and Mikey made friends with our booth buddies who apparently are involved in making his favorite tacos or something. Dan got a text message that Gary moved the party (WTF?!!?), but we were lazy and decided to stay.

About 1 o’clock I decided to check out so that I could attend some speeches tomorrow (full day!) and there are a bunch of parties I want to his up.

Apparently with old age I can only really rock it every other night, so here I am… almost 3 am… took a hot bath, dropped some more motrin and am watching Deception on tv.

Life is good.

Day 2 started out with dragging my ass out of bed at 8:30 and heading on over to the Hilton for Chris Messina’s Activity Streams speech. I am not going to cover any of the actual thoughts I have on any of the speeches in these posts as I feel that they each require their own blog entries (well the more interesting ones), so a short review… it was good, it was interesting and I left inspired (already have plans for use in a new project I am working on). #GettingStreamy

Presentation 2 was a panel by Happy Cog titled “We F*cked Up. Now What? Exploring Failure, Together “. Really really interesting. I felt a lot of empathy for the stories as I definitely related.  Extremely entertaining and funny.#SXSWFailure

Next up was something a bit more technical. We headed off to the web framework battle between Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Zope, Seaside and Symphony. No clear winner, but went over like 5 aspects of frameworks from barrier to entry, templating, scalability and database support. Was good to hear about some of the future Rails 3 stuff. #FrameWorkBattleRoyale

Following the lively debate, Dan and I headed over to watch the CSS Framework shootout. This was less fiesty then the web framework and they showed each other a lot of love. I was sad to see LESS not represented, especially with Compass being there. To be honest I don’t think i walked away with much that I didn’t know, however I am pretty familiar with frameworks. I did get a little background about the frameworks which was nice. It will be interesting to see how they evolve with HTML5 and the semantic web. #CSSFrameworks

Rounded up the day early (3 oclock speech) about HTML5 and CSS3. This was an interesting speech in the sense of it is right in my wheelhouse but it was presented very awkwardly. The speakers knew what they were talking about, but the idea of it being a show and tell, the only way this would have worked successfully, well it wasn’t not successful, it was just awkward, but it should have been more like a recorded presentation where the speakers just started and stopped the video so there was a lot less waiting time. BUT that being said, it was a great example of where we are headed and inspiring about the future of design. #CSS3DesignHTML5

Back to the hotel for some relaxation and dinner at the Omni.

Thanks to Dan and his boss Gary Vaynerchuck, we got VIP access to the live Diggnation. Really this isn’t my sort of thing, lots of fanboys and younger kids, but it was fun and totally worth the wait. I got to see Leo Laporte crowd surf. Nuff said.

Next we headed to the Happy Cog Karoke thing which was just to long a wait, ,so we hopped in a bicycle cap and headed over to Emo’s for a long island ice tea. We then walked around 6th and ended our evening meeting some of Mikey’s coworkers at Buffalo Billards.

Very drunk and very much in pain we headed back to the Omni at about 2am (which thanks to nature was actually 3).

Presentation 1, “Getting Excited About Typography”, was good. I was stuck sitting on the floor so I didn’t get to observe as much as I want so it probably was more impressive with the visuals. I am however now inspired to go home and try and make my own font. #GetYourGlyphon

Presentation 2, “Simple Steps to Great Web Design”, was better for the 10 minutes it went on, until we were evacuated from the building by an alarm. Slides

We took this evacuation notice as a message from god to get some rest and headed back to the hotel, grabbed showers and relaxed. Headed over to the Iron Cactus for some of their famous guac and had a couple margaritas. Headed back for an early night, hung out on the roof of the Omni for a bit and checked out the view (again, more pics later). Went to bed like 10 (yeah I know… but 1 hour sleep and Saturday parties looming).

So far so good.