If you guessed “the tacked-on laminated Westin Hotel podium sign” you get a cookie.

Think of the stage as a user interface. Everything that isn’t the speaker is noise that users must actively ignore. Like logos stamped on phones.

From top to bottom, Apple takes responsibility for the quality of their products. Got a problem? Go to the Apple Store. Need free training? Apple Store.

That’s ownership.

To see what abdicating ownership looks like, check out John Dowdell’s post about mobile Flash (and don’t miss the comments).

When you’ve got an operating system made by Google, a handset made by, well, anybody, sold by a meddlesome carrier, with Adobe’s Flash sitting on top, the quality chain is broken.

I’d pity Dowdell for having an impossible job if his first reaction wasn’t “blame the user!”

When people say that Android vs. iPhone is a replay of PC vs. Mac, in one sense they’re right. Nobody owns the quality chain for PCs, so you get cheap, overdesigned Dell hardware running Microsoft’s uninspired operating system, sold to you by a Best Buy blue shirt.

“To be succinct: I’m not sure that I serve my audience by worrying about how a new approach is going to help or hurt Barnes & Noble.” — Seth Godin on leaving traditional publishing

Think about your favorite products. I bet those with the best user experience are made by companies that align their interests with yours.

One reason Apple products are just better is that Apple’s customers and users are one and the same. Apple profits directly by selling premium stuff that people love.

Contrast that with the PC ecosystem. End users aren’t Microsoft’s most important customers; Dell is. The quality feedback loop between maker and user is broken.

Have you ever read How Buildings Learn? My favorite chapter explains why so many expensive university buildings are reviled by their occupants.

It turns out the architect’s client is not the occupant, but the university endowment. The architect and university both want expensive, novel, “prestige” buildings that photograph well. Meanwhile the occupants are forgotten until the malpractice suit over chronic roof leaks.

Adobe. They talk web design, but their products are really about print design and image processing. Dreamweaver and Fireworks, their tools made explicitly for the web, don’t fit today’s best practices and workflows. Dreamweaver is a joke, only good for making old school image maps. Fireworks, while more useful, is clunky, and still is just for making graphics instead of working layouts. The icing on the cake is that Adobe products are known to be bloated, crashy, and unusable.

Web Typography. We’ve come a long way, baby. Kinda. While we have some workable options for embedding web fonts, there are serious caveats. With TypeKit you have to lease the fonts forever. Other web font vendors let you embed fonts, if you can find the license and decipher it. Like Adobe’s software, the way fonts are sold and licensed is optimized for print design, not web design. Even if you manage to find a good embeddable font, it’s going to look crummy in Windows’ type rendering. Which brings us to…

Browsers, especially IE. Things have gotten better on this front thanks to web standards evangelists and the good folks behind Firefox and Webkit. However, even if IE9 comes out and is great, I guarantee it will still be a bother to test, and we’ll still have to support IE7 and 8 for years.

CSS. It just kind of sucks. I think CSS’ biggest problem is that it’s optimized for specifying colors and fonts, but poor at specifying layout. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to specify a grid layout in CSS instead of cobbling it together by styling each HTML element? Also, CSS tends to get bloated since it’s not programmatic and makes you repeat yourself.

I could go on, but you get the point; all our tools to build the web are blunt and rusty.

iPhone development sure is tempting lately.

It’s interesting how people react to the new larger font size. Most readers like it, but for some it’s a bit jarring because so much of the web is still set in tiny Verdana.

Beside the type, Fred’s readers are noticing much faster pages, which is a big win.

What we wanted to do with this redesign

1. Readability: If it looks better in Instapaper than in the browser, back to the drawing board.
2. Mobile Ready: His old template (that I also did) had mobile CSS for the iPhone, but on this go-around we made sure that it looked great on the iPad and Android too.
3. No More Widgets: 3rd party blog widgets tend to be noisy, more about promoting their own brand than being useful.
4. Speed: Widgets are also heavy, injecting a ton of javascripts, images, and HTTP requests into each page view. Even worse, they often don’t use compression or long cache headers. We took AVC.com weight from almost 900KB and 130 HTTP requests to 250KB and  39 requests (and just 40KB when everything is cached). Now pages load in well under a second instead of ~5 seconds.
5. Mobile Ready, Part II: The iPad and iPhone are now my target browsers, their limitations and features informing the design in subtle ways. For example, since getting the iPad, I prefer pages with subtle textured background. The texture serves to subtly anchor the scroll state, making it feel more tangible, and it also takes the edge off the screen brightness, allowing for visual effects like button embossing.

   However, if I had to pick one feature in the iPhone OS browser that changes everything, I’d say it’s the “double tap to zoom a column” feature. It’s a subtle, tiny thing, but it completely subverts clutter on the web, which makes the web a pleasure to read. Column zoom makes the iPad the best web browser yet devised.

Update:

Within an hour of the redesign launch, enough “the font is too big!” comments rolled in that we decided to nudge the base font down from 18px to 16px.

Thoughts on this:

1. After so many years of tiny type, the world isn’t ready for 18px yet. One commenter called it “yelling”.
2. It was too much change, too quickly.
3. Fred’s audience is finance oriented, and they prefer information density to breathing room. Think about Bloomberg machines, stock symbol tickers, and the way stock data is presented in newsprint.
4. The web is such a “your milage may vary” medium. On reflection, the type did look a little big on Arial in Windows, and Windows in general is biased toward making smaller type look good. Plus, you never know whether a Windows user has tweaked their DPI settings because so often the default DPI makes things look too small.
5. Interesting, no Mac or iPad users I ran it by said the type was too big. I think this has to do with type being rendered in a more aesthetically pleasing way on Macs. If a font renders a little ugly when small, it goes all sore thumb on you when large.

How many pixels in that UI are for writing and how many pixels are merely about writing?

Now I want you to look at this screenshot from the demo video of Pages for iPad:

Has the difference between software for creating and software about creating ever been more obvious?

An aside: watching these iPad demos, can there be any doubt that people who said the iPad is just for consuming, not creating are suffering from shrinkwrap Stockholm syndrome?

So how will companies in the “now with more features!” business respond to Apple’s new model for simple, useful, and usable software? Spoiler Alert: they’ll ignore it and ride their market inertia gravy train straight to hell.

• “Desktop OSes aren’t optimized for concentration.” —Craigmod’s blog.
• iPad and the Brain by Dave Troy.
• UX Hero posts: Computers vs. Creativity, iPhone Apps: why closed is better, and Serendipity makes software fun.

But so far, what I’ve noticed most about apps in AppWorld is that they are, for the most part, all about themselves. They’re not connected to the greater web, and they don’t encourage you to move seamlessly from one app to another, depending on your intent.

I replied:

Many of the best apps in the App Store serve as rich clients to web apps. It’s not an either/or proposition.

Many of the other apps are games (which have a rich history of being released on closed platforms) or little utilities that work better as widgets than websites.

And don’t forget that the iPhone was the first phone to have a non-godawful mobile browser.

The apps I use most are clients for internet services: Mail, Tweetie, Maps, Instapaper, and Yelp.

What’s interesting is that in most cases, the iPhone versions of popular web apps have a much better user experience than their desktop browser counterparts.

This is true because:

1. iPhone apps never forget who I am. Websites always do.
2. I always have these apps in my pants, ready to use.
3. Apps can use the full range of touch gestures, plus GPS, camera, accelerometers, etc. This is especially important for apps about location and map zooming.
4. The iPhone’s screen is both small and a known size. There’s no room for feature bloat and UI cruft. Designers can stick to a grid instead of sweating different resolutions.
5. When web services have good APIs, third party developers can design front ends that are better than what the designers at the mothership come up with (cough *Twitter* cough).

While screenshots can’t fully convey how good they feel, look at Tweetie and MobileRSS, third party apps for Twitter and Google Reader:

The designers at Twitter.com and Google Reader should be ashamed that third party designers can create a far better experience in far fewer pixels.

So, back to my original point, the open web and iPhone apps aren’t at odds; they’re two great tastes that taste great together.

More important, the iPhone has opened up a world beyond the hoary point and click interface, and software engineers should thank Steve Jobs in prayer every night for creating a platform where users love buying software.

See also: Watts Martin calling out Tim Bray for conflating Apps with the Internet.

Feedburner: Google folded them into their own login scheme. Google added crummy ad options to feeds. Otherwise the product is stuck. Feels undead.
What they should be working on: improving the display of RSS feeds, making RSS feel more like a human connection between publisher and reader, fixing the fact that when you put an RSS button on your site it’s a dumb, non-stateful button (compare RSS buttons to Tumblr or Twitter follow functionality).

Delicious: Yahoo folded them into their own login scheme. Then a crummy redesign. Now feels undead.
What they should be working on: umm… I dunno. It could use a serious UI overhaul, but the whole thing just smells like a zombie so what’s the point?

Flickr: Yahoo folded them into their own login scheme (notice a pattern?) It’s not quite undead because lots of people still use it and rely on it, but the UI is super stale.
What they should be working on: UX, UX, UX. Make everything faster and easier: uploading, managing, and sharing images. Make it simple for users to make money on their work. Fix the UI: it’s outrageous that you can’t view next and previous when you’re viewing the higher resolution versions of images.
Sad but telling fact: Ugly, half-assed TwitPic was able to capture the “post images to Twitter” market while Flickr sat on its hands.

Google Reader: While not an acquired startup, Google Reader is an example of what happens once Google commoditizes and dominates a product category: Google bolts on some half-assed social software functionality then gives up on it.

So here’s the apparent life cycle of a successful venture funded web startup:

1. Founders start working on an idea.
2. They take VC money. Their fate is now sealed because investors demand a “liquidity event“, ie, a big exit.
3. Google acquires startup, founders and investors are happy.
4. Startup’s product enters undead maintenance mode, founders can’t wait for their Google shares to vest so they can bail and write a blog post about how stuck they felt at a big company.

To be clear, I think the dynamic interplay of founders and investors is a big net win for the world. Indeed, it seems most of the best stuff was built this way. I just want everyone to consider what happens after the big payday. Is value created or destroyed when a great product is acquired by a big company with its own agenda?

• I’m not the first to notice this. See also these posts by: yours truly, 37signals, Dare Obasanjo, TechCrunch, and Slate.
• Related Wikipedia entries: List of acquisitions by Google and List of acquisitions by Yahoo.

I took a look at the plugins I need the most and realized that my Firefox setup is my internet immune system.

Consider:

• Adblock protects me from intrusive, sometimes offensive ads.
• Flashblock is inconvenient since I have to approve each Flash piece I encounter, but without it my CPU fans instantly spin up and my browser slows to a crawl. It also protects me from new tabs that autoplay sound and video.
• NoSquint protects me from tiny, unreadable text, and it also remembers my zoom settings for sites I frequent.
• Stylish lets me permanently “fix” ugly sites by adding my own CSS.
• They’re not Firefox plugins, but Instapaper and the Readability bookmarklet make the web readable again by improving typography and removing noisy, bloated sidebars.

Notice that the tools I’ve listed are not for browser security, but just to make the web tolerable.

What’s disturbing is that even reputable sites like the New York Times are much improved not just when ads are blocked, but when the entire site design is stripped away via Instapaper.

The web seems to have reached an unfortunate equilibrium of mostly bad design and mostly bad advertising. Until everybody else wakes up the best thing we can do is be the change we want to see:

1. If you’re responsible for a web site, don’t run intrusive, annoying, irrelevant ads. If you can only pay your bills by annoying your audience, maybe you should think about whether that’s a sustainable model.
2. If your content is more valuable after its design is stripped by Readability, then you should rethink your design.

Jeff: I was a little offended that people thought that we would damage the experience…

Joel: It’s like years and years of knowing you, and they still don’t trust you.

Taking VC is like marriage: the startup is your best friend, and the VC is the girl he’s marrying.

Even though you love and trust your friend, and even if you really like the girl he’s marrying, deep down you know that your friend will have new priorities and obligations. There are no more impromptu nights out at the bar, and at about 11pm he’s going to get that “where are you and when are you coming home?” phone call.

Of course, it’s selfish to begrudge your friend his new situation. Assuming he married the right girl, he’ll grow into a better person and a better friend to you.

The point is that users are selfish. They freak out at minor UI changes, so of course they’re going to worry when their favorite startup takes a swim in the VC shark tank.

Now, here’s the big however…

Getting acquired is totally different than taking VC money.

Plenty of companies are better off for taking VC, but I can’t think of a company that was better off after being acquired.

Every time Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft buy a company, it seems that the company either withers or stops innovating. Have Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube gotten significantly better since they were bought? And what about all the startups that you never hear of again until the founder’s Google shares have finally vested so he can quit in a huff?

There are some obvious reasons why being acquired zombifies startups: the founders cash out, the startup’s innovative culture gets borged, or the startup was only purchased to be killed as a competitor (or to prevent another competitor from buying it).

A perhaps less obvious reason is that once a startup is acquired, it’s been stamped with a perceived value, so there are strong incentives to protect that value by embalming it.

Here’s a fun thing to do on Twitter: click anywhere in the center of that grid of people you follow. Then click in the middle of that person’s grid, then the next person’s grid, and so on. Every time I do this I’m surprised at the cool new people and links I find. Now compare the quality of what you find in Twitter’s “trending topics” or “tweets near my location”, not nearly as good right? In fact, trends and location are counter-indicators of quality when compared to the undesigned alchemy of serendipity.

Lately I’ve been playing with Harmony, a simple web based drawing program [Flickr set]. Harmony is a serendipitous drawing program. You don’t really control it as much as nudge it along a path that generates interesting results.* I refer to Harmony as “AutoTune for drawing”, but it’s actually the opposite: instead of “correcting” you, Harmony adds noise and uncertainty to generate interesting output.

Compared to Twitter, Facebook offers a circumscribed experience. You don’t discover new people because Facebook is biased towards people already in or near your social circle. Even when you see new people in thread comments, you’ve been trained not to click on their names because the link usually leads to a locked page.

Even though PhotoShop is a “professional” tool, Harmony feels more powerful. With Harmony you can generate interesting art with almost no cognitive overhead. It just happens. Compare that to any of Adobe’s design software where it’s all deep nested menus, layers, and floating tool palettes. Yes, Harmony and Adobe products are for different things, but there’s no reason for Adobe to hit you with the space shuttle’s dashboard when all you want is to make a simple layout with nice typography.

Here’s the deal:

1. A simple system can generate complex, interesting outcomes.
2. A system front loaded with complexity constrains the possible outcomes.

Think about all the software you use. What software gets you into a flow state? What software is fun? What software makes you feel powerful?

Now think about software that feels like a chore, or that you only use because you have to.

I’ll best most of your favorite software is simple and serendipitous instead of complex, purposeful, and “enterprisey”.

• Google finds your treasure in the sea of noise.
• Twitter helps you make friends you’d never otherwise meet, who post valuable links you wouldn’t otherwise see.
• Wikipedia surfaces, shapes, and enables the sharing of our collective knowledge. Good social software works like an artificial reef. Good stuff sticks to it, and everybody wins.
• StackOverflow surfaces the knowledge and idle brain power of the world’s programmers.

Flickr, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, blogs… I could go on, but you get the idea.

There are few key things the best web services have in common, subtle things that make them great at surfacing the awesome:

1. They honor the link. Links are the fundamental building blocks of the web. Good web services link out generously, and they also provide discoverable, rot-resistant links inwards.
2. They don’t try to hoard traffic or attention. This was one of Google’s big insights. Sending users away to the value with zero friction fosters trust and repeat business.
3. They create more value than they capture. Google captures plenty of value, billions of dollars a quarter in fact, but they still generate far more value than they capture.
4. They provide value first and capture value later. StackOverflow gives the goods up front and for free. You don’t have to contribute, or even create an account, but if you do contribute, good things happen. You might make friends. You might build a reputation as a solid coder, surfacing your code portfolio that would otherwise be buried in a code repository at your day job. StackOverflow benefits from the audience they’ve created with ads and conferences, but only after they’ve provided the world with value first.
5. They’re serendipity engines. Sure you can rely on these services to give you what you ask for, but they’re also fuzzy enough that good unexpected things happen too. You might make a new lifelong friend you’d never have met otherwise, or you might discover a band that changes your life.
6. I’m sure there are other ways that awesomeness is surfaced; can you think of any I’ve missed?

This “Surfacing the Awesome” idea has been on my mind for a while, feels good to get it out there.

Also, I needed this post to exist so I can link to it when I write about the Bizarro services that try to capture the awesome instead of surfacing it.

After all, just look at the sheer volume of crap that gets made and shipped.

Shipping is common. Artists are rare.

“Real artists ship” sounds obvious and inevitable coming out of Steve Jobs’ mouth, but can you imagine any other tech manager calling their engineers artists?

Would your boss ever call you an artist? Would you ever call yourself one?

In the practical arts like engineering, design, and architecture, an artist is someone who displays an uncompromising obsession with quality, even if their work is invisible, and damn the consequences:

Yvon Chouinard’s hard steel climbing spikes were the foundation of his business, but they damaged the rocks in Yosemite. Instead of taking the easy path, Chouinard stopped selling the old stuff and invented new climbing equipment that sold better, performed better, and saved Yosemite’s rocks.

Steve Jobs is a product genius, and Jonathan Ive is an industrial design genius, but there’s more to it than that. Everything I’ve read about Apple’s culture says that Steve Jobs’ obsession with quality drives everything. So many crap products get made because artists don’t drive most companies: MBAs, lawyers, office politics, bean counters, and shareholders do.

Consider this story about master carpenter Tsunekazu Nishioka:

“I watched four senior carpenters standing at attention, silently accepting a stiff rebuke from the master. Their crime: someone had miscalculated a few millimeters on a hip rafter. The difference was hardly noticeable, even close up, but since the beam was designed to achieve its perfect form only after several years of sagging and shrinking, this small error would be magnified and possibly distort the whole. Fumed Nishioka, ‘They’ll laugh at me. They’ll say, “That’s not the way a hip rafter should look!’ And I won’t be around to defend myself.”

I bet most of us are inspired by that kind of commitment, but we don’t practice it in our work. How could we when most jobs are about not rocking the boat, punching a clock, avoiding blame, and making deadlines. In other words most jobs are about shipping, not making art.

So how do we get from just shipping to shipping art? I’m wrestling with this personally right now, and it’s not easy. The fixes are obvious, but they’re also terribly difficult because they require courage and sustained effort over time.

• See Folklore.org for stories about Apple’s early days and the origins of “real artists ship”.
• I first read the anecdote about Tsunekazu Nishioka in one of my favorite books: How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. See also: The genius of Japanese carpentry by Azby Brown.
• Yet more: Ira Glass on taste and quality.

Sprezzatura

“This is an archaic Italian word for being able to do your craft without a lot of visible effort. It’s a combination of elan and grace and class, sort of the opposite of loud grunts while you play tennis or a lot of whining and fuss when you help out a customer.”

— Seth Godin’s blog

I’m glad there’s a word for that. I’ve been thinking about it since I saw Kim Yu-Na win gold in Vancouver.

Her performances looked effortless, while her competitors looked stiff, the effort plain on their faces.

Great performers make their spectacular work look easy, inevitable even.

Listen to Apple’s Jonathan Ive discussing his work in Objectified. He talks about simplicity in design and the illusion of inevitability. Ive is my favorite industrial designer because he puts users first saying, “the terrible struggles we as designers and engineers had in trying to solve the problems” should be invisible.

Otherwise it wouldn’t be magic.

So, while my problem got fixed, and I got personal attention from the guy who wrote the book on Subversion (swoon!), why am I not happy?

Here’s why:

Let’s say my food comes out wrong at a restaurant. I think, “hey, these things happen, I won’t freak out because there’s a protocol for this.” Then I patiently explain the problem to my server, the server cheerfully fixes the issue, and we both get to look like heroes.*

Now, let’s say the server ignores me. At this point everyone loses because it’s not a routine bug anymore, it’s a confrontation. I’ve got to find the manager and dump my problems on her. She’ll have to deal with me, with the server, and no matter how the manager fixes the problem, it can’t make up for the ruined meal and the stress incurred on everyone.

This is exactly how it feels to customers when we’re forced to resort to complaining on the internet because there’s a breakdown in customer service.

The path for users to get help must be clearly marked and well lit. No ambiguity, no forks in the road.

Here’s an example of what I mean, fresh in my mind because it happened yesterday:

1. I noticed I wasn’t getting Twitter updates, so I went to Twitter’s help site.
2. Like a good user, I made sure my problem wasn’t on the “known issues” list.
3. It wasn’t a known issue, so I looked for the “Report a Problem” button and…
4. Uh oh. No button. Anywhere.

It turns out there is a support form, but I only found it after stumbling around Get Satisfaction. The whole time I thought, “I should just complain directly to @alex, @ev, @biz, @stop, and whoever else I can think of who works at Twitter.” If there’s no official community manager, users will seek out whoever has a public face at the company.

Remember, the key is that the customer and the waiter both know and follow the service protocol. If the customer has to opt out of a dead end service path to complain to the manager, or to the internet, everyone loses.

* I’m serious about the “looking like heroes” thing. Your boss, date, or whoever you’re eating with is watching you. The prime social directive is to add to everyone’s enjoyment while gliding over the potholes. Meanwhile the prime service directive is not just to serve, but to have customers come away with warm fuzzies and maybe even a story about how good the service was.