“The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry is that ‘nobody knows anything’. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

Great formulas (ex: attractive cast, epic storyline) fail as often as they succeed, even after 100 years of filmmaking. Goldman admits there are so many moving parts to assemble, it’s a miracle any film gets made, much less a great one.

Everybody Knows Everything

Compare with the decade-old web design industry. The formulas for successful websites have developed mighty fast. We’ve got tons of books, tutorials, blogs and conference lectures to learn from, plus disproportionate numbers of experts, consultants, coaches, evangelists and assorted gurus.

So on the surface, “everybody knows everything”. Information is plentiful. Methods are transparent. There should be no excuse for a mediocre website. Why doesn’t “guru”-level knowledge translate into launching better websites?

Easiest conclusion—interesting, addictive content is not valued enough. Often it’s an afterthought, barely discussed with the client. It’s like magic dust and neither guru nor client knows where it will come from. The final product is a sparkly site with forgettable content. It’s like building a car and considering the engine last. Or just as often, neglecting to install one.

The Original Gurus

Geeks and gurus could learn something from their advertising roots. Consider the Mad Men era of advertising, defined by stuff like Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Volkswagen ad campaigns.

“[The Volkswagen ads] changed the rules. Agencies were no longer punished but rewarded for arguing with clients, for breaking the guidelines of art direction, for clowning around in the copy, for using ethnic locutions and academic references and a myriad of other once-forbidden formulae. Seemingly overnight, a great wave of originality engulfed the advertising profession…”

DDB ad men were notoriously flamboyant, but they had the vision to back it up. They looked at the big picture and wanted their ads to have cultural impact. They studied human behavior. They wanted their product to be smart. Can that be said of today’s gurus?

To generalize greatly, there is too much time spent lost in the tunnel-vision world of shiny gadgets, tech trends and empty “social media” promises and way too little time on basic human psychology and the fundamentals that made 1960s advertising so powerful—figuring out what the public wants and finding smart, persuasive ways to give it to them.

Missing Ingredients and Healthy Content

William Goldman says the elusive element of success is timing. Even with great acting and a great story, the stars rarely align so that a movie gets released at the perfect time of year in the perfect stage of the actors’ popularity in a way that overlaps with what the public wants.

Of the 771 movies released in 2010 so far, how many have you heard of? How many got good reviews? How many really spoke to the public’s needs and wants?

In web design and blogging, most would say “compelling content” is what eludes us. But even after 10 years, no two people even agree on what “compelling content” means. If anything, it’s a constantly moving target, consumed by a fickle audience who travel the web too quickly to differentiate between fast-food addictions like Mashable and healthier “slow web” addictions to sites like A List Apart, Design Observer, Good, N+1 or The Smart Set.

Web design conferences could use an equivalent to Jamie Oliver’s “Teach Every Child About Food” speech to remind people of how nourishing good content can be.

Solving the Content Mystery

In one sense, it’s a fine thing that so few know how to crack the mystery of making great, addictive content. The elusive nature keeps us creative, makes us chase abstract ideas, forces us to put human psychology at the forefront of the things we create.

Client projects should include in-depth discussions of how the content itself (not jQuery effects or “social media” tie-ins) is going to propel their site. Setting them up with a WordPress theme, giving them the keys and waving goodbye just isn’t enough.

2010 is still the Stone Ages of the internet. With all our expertise maybe we still don’t “know anything”, but by now we should at least know enough about our fellow humans to deliver them something they benefit from rather than selling our expertise in the form of a dull, hollow wrapper of a website that no one cares to visit more than once.

• “A main problem is that it just doesn’t fill a need that anyone in the community has.“
• “It seems more like an exercise in marketing and branding than a useful tool for designers.“
• “ Dribbble has an identity crisis. It’s somewhere between exclusive, high-quality and universal, mixed-quality…Seems like it’s caught in the middle.“
• “Who is it even for? What void in the community was it filling?“
• “If everyone on the site is using the site differently then the context of it all is constantly changing and its hard to meet the expectations of your users when this happens.“

All those comments suggest the same things: the community doesn’t operate in a way they expect, its purpose isn’t well defined, and the ways its being used aren’t consistent.

Like I said at Drawar, I don’t think any of this matters:

My personal belief is that there are some apps and some communities that are open-ended by design. And there is no amount of strategizing that will help you determine if they succeed. The community must self-police and find its own purpose. And it might mutate over time. Like a restaurant, it will often fail. But when it succeeds, it won’t often be for the reasons the founders originally envisioned.

I’ve joined many communities over the years and one thing I’ve learned by talking to admins is no matter what void they’re trying to fill and what ideals a community is built around, they ultimately have to step back and surrender much of it to the community members themselves. A good community will develop a life of its own, beyond the control or desires of the admins. Predictions are futile.

I actually like that there’s no real endgame at Dribbble. The Design Swap concept is similarly loose. Once a tool is in the hands of a bunch of opinionated, overstimulated designers, it will be used in unexpected ways—that’s the only prediction that isn’t futile. Even if only 5 people find it fun and useful, a void has been filled.

Rather than searching for a purpose, I’ve been enjoying Dribbble for one of the reasons I (finally) came around to appreciating Twitter: because it’s a personality filter. It can indirectly reveal thoughts and personality traits. It can offer a composite of what’s happening in a person’s life.

Take my buddy Pat’s Dribbble profile. You can follow the initial sketches he made for something called Made by Athlete, to the increasing freelance projects, to an image he finally posted that said, “I resign”—

As it turns out (drumroll) he was quitting his job to create a new freelance business called Made by Athlete. Through the same ambient intimacy that lets me get to know people through Twitter, I’ve gotten to see the changes happening in Pat’s life through a series of images.

Lately I’ve been studying old movie posters and title stills. When I make a new blog post, I’ll create a still and promote it at Dribble just for fun.

If you remember, Twitter eventually outgrew their “What are you doing?” prompt because it didn’t reflect how people were using the app. I think Dribbble’s “What are you Working On?” already risks being outdated since, like the movie stills idea, the context of shots isn’t always about paid projects.

Another unexpected Dribbble behavior: people consistently vote hand-drawn illustrations to the top of the Popular view. Illustration skills are something a lot of web designers can envy. Many of these artists aren’t household names in the web design world either, which suggests they rely on talent over self-promotion. That those talents are celebrated seems like a sign of Dribbble’s success and pretty much the opposite of snobbery.

One of my favorite books is William Goldman’s (screenwriter of The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) “Adventures in the Screen Trade”. What I love is there are no conclusions about filmmaking. Just one recurring anti-conclusion: “nobody knows anything.”

“The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry is that ‘nobody knows anything’. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

Great formulas (ex: attractive cast, epic storyline) fail as often as they succeed. Goldman admits there are so many moving parts to assemble, it’s a miracle any movie gets made, much less a great one.

But then you will have fluke sleeper movies which are open-ended by design. They cost little to make and have no stars. Word gets out, they take on a life of their own, eventually they belong to an audience and the audience’s interpretation. They’re not trying too hard to fill a void which makes audiences connect for exactly that reason. No amount of control or contrivance can create that. Sometimes it’s just good chemistry and dumb luck.

Raise your hand if you never went to art school. For better or worse I jumped into interactive design without learning design fundamentals. Instead I worked backwards, self-educating intensely, even now.

Part of the trick is using the tools you’re born with: strong opinions and the desire to make decisions based on taste. Not just taste, but let’s call it snobbery (in the nicest sense). If you’re a snob about food, music or furniture, you might already be wired to design things or at least appreciate it when you see it.

But interactive design should enable the largest possible audience to accomplish and experience things easily. Visual design snobbishness has to be calibrated for the masses. We know that websites shouldn’t make us think. What I’ve realized now that machines have completely taken over my life is that websites must also have great social skills.

Simply being “usable” isn’t enough, no more than nice cars should be merely “driveable”. Ideally, a website should spark an interesting conversation the moment it loads. It should usher you from page to page, telling great stories along the way. It shouldn’t come on too shy or too strong. It should look sharp without looking vain. No gradients or noise filters can replace social skills, just like an expensive haircut can’t give someone a better personality.

As the digital world gets faster and more complicated, the more designers resist, forcing it to stay grounded and human-centered. More websites are attempting to be conversational lately, which is good, even if many are doing it the same way:

I don’t want to criticize what looks like trendiness here because I think it’s happening for a reason. Below the surface I honestly think there’s a desire to look users in the eye, shake their hand and make them remember you are (again the irony being that “Hi, I’m [x]” is now too common to be distinctive, but it’s a start.)

A rule of thumb in creative writing classes is “show, don’t tell”. If a writer is good enough at making overtures about the story and character, he won’t need to hit you over the head with what he’s trying to say. For this reason, a good sign-up form should never require instructions.

See what HuffDuffer did to make their form more conversational:

The support page at Sifter recently added some dynamic date info for a nice bit of human touch:

For the first 5 years of what I’d call the mainstream web (2000-2005), most sites lacked social skills. Plenty tried to be deliberately mysterious, and succeeded at that, even as they failed as websites. The narrative seems to finally be getting better.

I’ve come to think of it this way: when you’re out at a bar with a group of strangers, there will inevitably be one person in the room who tells the best stories. If you’re lucky, the person is also polite, they exhibit good taste and understand the dynamics of a conversation. People are attracted to that person magnetically for the rest of the evening. Our websites should be that person.

As WPQuestions has continued gaining users, we’ve also expanded our family of sites to include Javascript, the Symfony framework and PHP, all using a single installation of the custom Q&A software we’ve built.

This week we’ve also launched CodeWi.se, which will be the parent site and aggregator for all the sites mentioned above:

Ultimately we decided not to combine all technologies into one site, Stack Overflow-style, as we didn’t want it to become one-size-fits-all for all developers. Technologies like WordPress have their own specific niche and specific flavor which we didn’t want to water down.

At the same time, if any ambitious developers want to browse questions from all of these sites, the can do it via CodeWise, which was built with the Accumulo aggregator theme. Note: all blogging for these sites will also be done via CodeWise now, too.

Specific blog posts can be credited with widespread influence of opinion. How can microblogging’s limited format accomplish the same thing?

In the early days, blogs were mostly misunderstood by establishment media as glorified diary entries, navel-gaving or just a fad. Eventually it was recognized that blogs were just the platform. Self-publishing itself was the real revolution, whether or not you called your website a “blog”, a magazine, a journal or whatever.

Making a Dent

90% of everything is still crud and blogs are no different. Yet the other 10% has been responsible for some game-changing ideas. In our own industry, there are writers and thinkers (ex: John Gruber, Mark Pilgrim, Jeff Croft, Jeremy Keith) who make a dent in the way we think about websites nearly every time they post.

Blogs got another credibility boost when businesses began using them strategically. Back in 2008, 37signals’ Jason Fried wrote “Why We Skip Photoshop”.

When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup…None of this is to say we think Photoshop is bad or a waste of money or time, but for us we’ve found that going straight into HTML/CSS affords us the best iterative and creative experience.

He simply posted about his process—causing thousands of others to reevaluate their own processes. A discussion about mockups vs. prototypes broke out. Some had epiphanies about how to develop more efficiently. This post by Meagan Fisher a year later sealed it.

So the blog format—able to support traditional long-form essays, rich formatting and hyperlinks and references—has proven its ability to drive persuasive ideas.

Then Came Microblogging

As the lead microblogging tool, Twitter is now past the early stages of being dismissed (ahem). Journalists write about it breathlessly in situations like the American student’s arrest in Egypt or the Hudson River rescue ferry. But those examples are more about Twitter’s role in the incidents themselves rather than the substance of the tweets. Maybe that’s its strength.

But I still wonder about the idea of individual tweets causing important shifts in our thinking. Is that even reasonable to expect from a 140-character format?

“Why We Skip Photoshop” is what I consider a “reinforcer” post. Fried isn’t proposing a new technique. He’s reinforcing his own methods aloud. Many readers already developed their prototypes in the browser, but the reinforcing nature of Fried’s post made it official.

Twitter is good for reinforcer posts. This tweet from Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the very few I’ve seen quoted often:

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

Surely most designers felt that already, maybe subconsciously. But it struck a chord and touched on a common problem. Instead of being a game-changer, it reinforced that above all, Design should be intertwined with Message, not sprinkled in the margins.

When I asked on Twitter about noteworthy tweets, @timothymeaney from arc90 responded with this by @codinghorror:

people > algorithms

And this by @timbray:

Perhaps it’s as simple as this: Slow conversations are better than fast ones.

Those are both memorable and obviously helped reinforce unspoken ideas that already lived somewhere in the public consciousness.

Conversation Starters

Last month, Elliot Jay Stocks tweeted this:

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

It led to a discussion on Twitter that meandered all over the place. Elliot then posted a much longer follow-up. It became clear no two people fully agreed about what makes a well-rounded Web Designer. It was a conversation that needed to happen and it started with < 140 characters.

These days it's a short distance between a moment of brainstorm and a bit of published text that might lead to sea change within an industry. What other specific tweets have caused a change in your thinking? Which ones can you recall word-for-word? Are there ways microblogging could be useful that aren’t being explored yet?

Or, is microblogging a good platform for conveying substantial ideas in the first place? Are we too busy compressing ideas rather than exploring them?