But the most important point is that responsive design — if done correctly — does involve creating distinct user interfaces for each platform. After all, the entire idea is that the design adapts (or “responds”) to the capabilities of the user’s specific platform.

I don’t believe Responsive Design was intended to be an add-on to your existing design. It’s something you embrace from the beginning. You shouldn’t be trying to shrink your design down to fit onto mobile devices, as much as you should be expanding outward to larger screens.

The core of your design, the epicenter, should be the heart of all interfaces regardless of size. Larger screens have more tolerance for ancillary information, where mobile sites need to cut to the chase.

When you start with the epicenter and design for mobile first, you have freedom to expand. But, when you start with a large robust design, all you can do is find clever ways to squeeze your design into smaller devices.

Over the last few weeks We’ve seen responsive web design get blamed for everything from bad usability to the reason Facebook’s stock is tanking.

[…]

What is being described here isn’t a design problem, it’s a content problem. You can’t make your site responsive because your content strategy is out of whack. The responsive technique is becoming the fall guy for a content problem.

Windows 8 introduces a new kind of app, which we codenamed “Metro style” following the design language that has evolved going back to Windows Media Center and the new Windows Phone. These apps are immersive, full-screen, beautiful, and optimized for the ways that people commonly use devices today.

I thought it would be useful to take a step back and describe a little bit of the background of how the Windows 8 user interface was designed, and discuss some of the decisions we’ve made and the goals of this new experience in more detail.

My wife almost fell out of her chair last week when I told her I was really impressed with the thinking behind the new Windows.

I might even buy one as a gaming computer around the house. But, I can't imagine anything pulling me away from OSX at work for quite some time.

Building high quality products is technically difficult and emotionally challenging. Technical obstacles are overcome with education, but emotional challenges require persistence.

Designers love to change things along the journey. They'll pick up a pen and paper, and with a few strokes, completely change the design of a feature. Their ability to do that is what makes their design great. Getting feedback from customers continually, and making changes along the way.

These changes can be hard on developers, who have invested considerable time and energy into the implementation of the designers vision. They refactor their code, filing off the rough edges and refining it to stability. Even for developers who embrace changes, it's far more painful for them than it is for designers.

This causes friction. It's this friction that empowers us to build great products. It's this friction that mediocre design companies avoid. Often times, the hard discussions are the ones most worth having.

What discussions are you avoiding?

Adopting an agile responsive approach will free you from the constraints of the waterfall process. Your design and development will be streamlined, you’ll be more productive and efficient and your online brand presence will be maximized on all possible platforms and screens. The real challenge is breaking out of the waterfall mold and becoming a responsive organization. Follow these five steps and you might just say “bye, bye” to the waterfall and “hello” to responsive Web design.

The author has taken 2 completely independant (trendy) ideas, both defined accurately, and trainwrecked them together into a post which makes no damn sense.

Waterfall is a project management process while responsive web design is a design consideration. They are entirely seperate, non-overlapping ideas. While an Agile approach would be more efficient in his example, it’s not unrealistic for responsive projects to live in waterfall worlds.

Which of ReadWriteWeb’s editors signed off on this?

Having some kind of notion what line of business your fledgling company might want to pursue used to be a prerequisite to raising capital. Now, it’s a mark of hubris. You don’t tell the market what it needs; you gently offer it a series of options, which are less viable concepts than ritual sacrifices aimed at cultivating the favor of the start-up gods. It’s called “iterating.”

Words escape me… and I’m normally full of words.

Bill Number S4129, State of New York:

Interesting. From my untrained eye, it looks like the goal is to empower the Department of Labor to oversee payment discrepancies, rather than requiring a trip to small-claims (or higher) courts.

I’m not sure this is needed, but it’s not a terrible idea either. But, why stoop to such a tacky publicity stunt?

In the spring of 2010, Freelancers Union members and staff successfully convinced New York policymakers to introduce a bill that would protect independent workers from clients who don’t pay: the Freelancer Payment Protection Act. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to vote on it that session. The bill was reintroduced in early 2011, and again Freelancers Union members and staff met with legislators to explain how important the bill would be to the livelihood of the self-employed and the state. After we sent 60 freelancers to Albany for a series of meetings with elected officials, the New York State Assembly passed the bill on June 20, 2011. Now we need the Senate to do the same.

It’s true, whenever you do business you run the risk of not being paid. But, many times it’s just as much the fault of the contractor as it is of the company who hired them. These listings aren’t verified (and couldn’t be, practically), and so they aren’t going to be credible to law makers.

What’s worse, it’s encouraging people to publicly shame their clients. The site has gone viral because it grants vengence against those who wronged you. That’s a dangerous attitude to have in business.

For true deadbeat clients, it’s not worth the time or energy to shame them. For other more moderate circumstances - which I speculate are most of these listings - it’s not productive either.

The Freelancer Payment Protection Act is only on the books in New York state, yet the listings are worldwide. It also only applies to freelancers with outstanding invoices over $600, which also rules out many of the listings.

If you continue to work when the checks aren’t coming in, to the tune of tens-of-thousands of dollars, who’s the idiot? (hint, it’s not your client).

At least they aren’t calling out these “deadbeat clients” by name… Oh… wait.

When I was at Nokia and we shipped a Symbian product and it was bad, in its worst incarnation we knew that if we just flipped the switch, we could move 2.5 to three million units — overnight, no matter how bad the product… That was Nokia. That was Nokia’s brand, we knew we could count on that.

And now look at it — they flipped the switch and oh, 200,000 [Windows Phone] units out of the gate. Huh? Only selling in the US, under AT&T’s moniker. If you can’t flip the switch like that, Nokia’s dead and devalued.

(via Kontra)

Nokia built it’s business competing on price. For many years, they were the defacto penny-phone at all the major carriers. The user experience of Symbian was poor, but it didn’t matter because it lived in a sea with other phones with the same poor experiences. There wasn’t a good reason NOT to buy a Nokia phone. I’ve owned several of them.

Apple gave us that reason. They used their unwavering great taste to build a better product and are selling it for less than Nokia’s penny.

Nokia is being forced to compete on taste, and they are all-in on Windows Phone 7. I think Windows Phone could be a strong player, is that enough to save Nokia?

Most people don’t have great taste. (And they don’t care, so it doesn’t matter to them.) They usually like tasteful, well-designed products, but often don’t recognize why, or care more about other factors when making buying decisions.

People who naturally recognize tasteful, well-designed products are a small subset of the population. But people who can create them are a much smaller subset.

Taste in product creation overlaps a lot with design: doing it well requires it to be valued, rewarded, and embedded in the company’s culture and upper leadership. If it’s not, great taste can’t guide product decisions, and great designers leave.

No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste.

As a designer, I tell my clients that they should hire designers based on two factors: their good taste, and their ability to create things that satisfy that taste.

You are investing in the designer, not in their ability to satisfy your taste. A designers abilities are capped by their own taste. It’s critical to find designers with better taste than you have, otherwise you’ll never be satisfied. Once you’ve found them, empower them to make decisions based on their taste, and never let them go. Trust them, and they’ll take you places you’ve never imagined.

Designers with great taste are hard to come by. But, designers who are able to create something you are proud of without sacrificing their taste is even more rare. That’s what I’ve aspired to build in our team, and I can attest to just how hard it is to find those people.

Apple has figured out how to do this at enormous scale, and that’s why they won’t be easily copied.