designcult

Thief, thief, thief! Baggins!

I'm slowly reading "The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion" by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. It's a dense exegesis of LOTR and clearly for pretty obsessive Tolkien fans only.

It's a lot of fun, though. My favorite so far is finding out that baggins is, among other things, English country speak for afternoon tea.There's also layers of bag related language play: Bag-end is Anglicized cul-de-sac (which is in turn faux French), Baggins vs. Sackville Baggins, etc.

I like dense naming. See also Warren Ellis's explanation of how he names characters, in part:

For instance: I’m working on something right now where I think I’ve nailed the character name finally. Birch. Birch = wood = connotes a degree of strength and basic groundedness. But also birching = flagellation. Also, “John Birch Society,” skeevy and untrustworthy. And it’s a hard, sharp word. There’s a lot about the character that unpacks out of the name.

I'm working with some folks on a product name right now. It's hard. And I think the good ones have dense (and sometimes non-obvious) layers of meaning, just like in fiction.

Some pretty random thoughts about Internet stuff

These are unorganized thoughts that are bouncing through my head right now.

• Facebook and Twitter could become less ephemeral. I first said should not could, but there's a trade-off there. The reason for becoming less ephemeral is to allow users to collect and re-assess their fleeting thoughts and links and conversations for later consideration. The reason not to, of course, is that sometimes you don't want that.
• On balance, though, I'd rather have it than not. After all, I'm pretty sure that (in some abstracted sense at least), it's being done about my data for other reasons. Why don't I get to play?
• I'm hearing more about Livejournal from outside the circle of people-who-have-been-using-it-all-along. I doubt it is going to have a renaissance in a business or growth sense, it's more that folks are figuring out some of what was right about  it all along. I tend to think about this in terms of UI details (like putting the "who this post will be exposed to" option very clearly under every post) that emphasize its flexibility on the public / friends / private axes. This person seems to think somehting similar. But it's not just about that axis, there's also something about navigating the line between intimacy (Facebook, at it's best) and publicity (regular blogs).
• I'm pretty sure that last is at least one reason why Tumblr is taking off as it is. It has really nailed the feeling of connecting intimate communities while also constantly running into new things.
• I wish it had a "friends-only" post feature, though. That's Livejournal talking again.
• On a third axis (personal control), I was and am pretty skeptical of the chances of Diaspora's success. But this post on why gender is a text field on Diaspora is one of the finest things I've seen in a long time and pleases me muchly.

The end of November and fading technology

It's the last day of November, 2010. I realized today while talking to a coworker over lunch that I couldn't remember the last time I used an analog phone on my end. And it was only with a bit of thinking I could say that probably when I called my grandmother (one day late for her birthday, but in time for Thanksgiving) she answered on an analog phone. Unless her retirement community switched to VoIP, which they might have.

Last weekend I was sorting out cables in my office. The (internal, PCI, unknown baud) modem went in the trash. Just typing the words "PCI" and "baud" feels ancient to me. Some of this is personal, rather than technological: poking around inside of computers is something I did for fun and for pay in the late 20th century.

Typing the words "late 20th century" feels ancient to me.

I remember reading in the 90s, with some excitement, about Bruce Sterling's Dead Media project. At the time, I knew him as a science-fiction writer. The idea that media I was then using could die in my lifetime was compelling. It made sense to me.

I think it's routine now. I am not saying anything new (and I think I'm writing here mostly about old) but really just marking this moment, the end of the month of November in the year 2010. One of those future-sounding years we hit every year now. Marking it as a moment in the passing of the old, as is appropriate for Fall.

I probably chucked a half-dozen dead or dying technologies just sorting cables. Kept a few as well, because I'm bad at throwing things out. The miniature cassette recorder stayed. The CueCat stayed. I kept that thing (acquired from a Wired subscription, natch) with the intention of using it for something cool like scanning my book collection. I held onto it past when folks had written software to do just that for an individual, past when social book collection sites appeared, past the point where I wouldn't be able to use it with my computer without an adapter, and right up to the now, when I own a pocket-sized device which, when combined with an app (which is now owned by a company that was young when the CueCat appeared and which I worked for for a time) does that which I thought I might be able to get the CueCat to do as a narrow subset of its function.

(That sentence got a little tangled. History is tangled.)

I have one device which plays full-sized music cassette tapes in the house. It's  not a tape player, it's a hacky thing which fits into a PC drive bay (again, this sounds like I'm talking about vacuum tube diodes) so you can theoretically record your old mixtapes to MP3s. That's just one of a large number of possible old media projects taking up space in our house right now.

My children will probably never ask a stranger for spare change so they can call me from a payphone to ask if I can pick them up. Unless they're in a play, I guess.

This is normal. This is always happening. This may be happening at an accelerated rate, but that might also be an artifact of our inevitable Presentism.

In a few weeks I'm going to dress up in deliberately archaic clothing and walk through a pretend London. A few weeks ago, I dressed up in deliberately archaic clothing and danced at a club night that plays only music from a single decade but has been running for almost two. When I was a kid and visited London, it seemed to be a magical place where all the youth cultures of previous decades (at least the ones I cared about) kept on, incarnated in actual people.

I don't know if it's age, or the times, or the Internet, or whatever, but more places than London seem like that to me now.

On borrowing ideas

If you think you operate in isolation from other designers, gamers, and the culture at large, you're mistaken. And worse, if you don't look at similar problems and systems, you're undercutting your chances of a successful design. You can get creative raw materials this way because, for all creative work, your materials are ideas. This isn't to say you swipe text and settings and so forth. Build up a library of resources that are both close and distant, and learn the options you have.

When you look to use ideas you find useful, it's best to borrow from distant sources; generally speaking, if you are writing a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, then swiping from other D&D adventures makes you a thief, whereas borrowing an element from board games or MMOs makes you smart. Borrowing from much more distant sources like theatre or history makes you a creative genius. Research the field, and then go far beyond that.

-- 'The Process of Creative Thought' from The Kobold Guide to Game Design by Wolfgang Bauer

This is not a new thought, but I thought it particularly well stated. I'm reading a lot on game design (both computer and tabletop) right now, and I'm tickled at how applicable most of the ideas are to non-game user experience work.

Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise -- the use (and mis-use) of "levels 'n grind" style game mechanics (among many other things) is pretty much a straight descent from Gygax and Arneson in 1974 to fantasy computer games to modern MMOs to the gameofication of software.Not sure what Gary would think of Foursquare, though ...

When OAuth Fails: A Visual Guide

If you rely on 3rd party authentication (like OAuth, Facebook Connect, or similar) for your site, or you are planning to, you should spend a little time thinking about what happens if those 3rd parties are unavailable.

Facebook has very good uptime (Twitter somewhat less so, though improving), but very good is not the same as perfect, as a lot of people found out on September 23rd, when they had their worst outage in 4 years. (It's to their credit that their worst outage was only 2.5 hours long!)

While they were down, I grabbed some screenshots of what happened at sites that relied on facebook Connect for login. The results were interesting.

When you log in to Typepad, this is what you're supposed to see. You can use your Typepad account (if you have one) on the left, or one of many alternatives on the right. The default alternative is Facebook, so Facebook Connect's button appears:

Except, of course, if it doesn't:

(Note: I actually still get this on Typepad sometimes, so it's possible it's an unrelated issue.)

On Hunch, the button was not an issue (probably because it wasn't stored on a Facebook server):

TheFacebook Connect screen the button led to, however, was down completely.

Finally, Plaxo's Facebook Connect screen gave me this fun warning, which I suspect means I caught it while facebook was in the process of coming back up.

 

What to do?

Well, relying on 3rd parties isn't new, as anyone who's worked on a payment flow with a 3rd-party payment processor can tell you. (And this is easier, because you probably aren't in the middle of a financial transaction.)

You should think through what happens if the service is unavailable (including things like visual assets) and make sure your screen still makes sense to the user.To te extent possible you should try to avoid simply loading blank pages -- if you can, detect the outage and give a message to the user. It's nice if you have alternative means of logging in, but in most cases a simple "wait and try again" would be sufficient.

 

Changing the audience

Still curious what the band was doing exactly during "Realize," and where all that melody came from, I press him about it. "There was no melody!," he exclaims. "Every melody everyone had  was in their head." The group played "all the strings on the bass at the same time and then me with this whammy pedal able to go two octaves lower and then bring it up and down like that. And then with various distortion pedals I could change the texture of the noise whenever I wanted so it wasn't just like one sound, it was just sort of moving along somehow. It was the best part of the night always and each night it was an experiment to see how long it would take for the audience to turn from like one state to another. A certain percentage of the audience would start sticking their fingers up at us or they would put their hands up in the air with their eyes closed, or do somethig physical. I pretty much would always go on as long as it took to change the audience."

"When it was clear that the audience was changed, totally--even if it was one person left with their fingers in the air or in their ears, we would wait for them to give into it, " Kevin explains. "Sometimes it would take forty minutes for that one individual to give up. When the audience was fully and utterly done, we had the signal process where I would look at Debbie and we'd go back to the final parts of the song."

-- from "33 1/2: Loveless", by Mike McGonigal, a book-long essay on the album Loveless by My Bloody Valentine

Kevin Shields (of My Bloody Valentine) goes on to explain that they had to stop "experiments" like this because of accumulated hearing damage. Although I'm pretty sure they did it when I saw them just a few years ago ...

Pants Pant Pants (a Q&A Comparison)

A pants problem

I had a pants problem, and I turned to the Internet for advice.

And then I turned my pants problem into a practical comparison of some of the different ways to get answers to tricky life questions from the Internet.

A short summary of my problem:

I'm really picky about pants, and having trouble finding pants I like. I'm tired of super-expensive jeans, and khakis and most dressy pants I see are boring.

Does anyone have suggestions for pants that I can wear to the office, that look good, aren't totally boring, and are fairly durable? Easy to clean would be nice, but I can handle dry-cleaning.

I'm totally serious about this question.

Questions and answers

I posted that to Quora, which was the service which got me thinking about question and answer services. (That and my desperate need for better pants.) Quora seemed intriguing, and I keep getting invites from other people, but the questions seemed pretty ... limited in scope. It's all very Silicon Valley inward-facing with lots of thinky questions about design process and The State of The Industry and etc. All the questions I came up with on that front seemed pretty artificial, and I wondered how they'd handle a more down-to-earth subject.

Similarly, with Aardvark, I'd done a bunch of answering questions (usually about restaurants in San Francisco, a perennial favorite), and enjoyed the experience, but had never tried asking something myself.

So I decided to use my pants problem to put them to the test.

That Sounds Right

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

-- Douglas Adams, from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Best email unsubscribe flow ever?

I've been on a binge of unsubscribing from various email marketing lists, as an attention cleanser. It makes me feel good. There's a hierarchy of experience to unsubscribe flows, from the good (clear link in the email, one click to unsubscribe) to the meh (have to hunt to find the link, unsubscribe not the default action on the resulting page) to the awful (you have to log in to unsubscribe, and you're not sure you even have an account). Some even have some charming copy, but I'd never run into one that was flat out AWESOME until I unsubbed from Etsy's newsletter.

(Don't worry, Etsy. I still love you. I just don't want the newsletter anymore.)

Screenshots below, but honestly, it's worth subscribing and unsubscribing for the full experience.

Screen 1:

Screen 2:

Bravo, Etsy!

ETA: Link to the video, because you want to now, don't you.

Reffell's law of PowerPoint writing loss

I'm in my home office, sorting old papers. And of course reading some of them. Apparently, in graduate school I was able to write clearly and analytically, at length, about complicated things like privacy regulations in the EU. There is little poetry, but there are thoughts, conveyed in English, by words on paper. There is clarity. There is precision. There are ideas that carefully build upon each other, in crisp sentences, stacked in well-ordered paragraphs, to a logical conclusion. (There are also too many commas and horrible typos, but that's always been true of my writing.)

I've had a Theory for a while (which for this post I've given a field promotion to Law) that explains why graduate school was the peak of my writing ability.  It is not because of age, or because I write less now. It is because of PowerPoint.

Reffell's law: For every year you write seriously, starting around Kindergarten, you get incrementally better at writing. And for every year you write serious amounts of PowerPoint (or Keynote) in a corporate environment, you lose one of those increments.

That's put me back, effectively, to my senior year in high school. (The startup years don't count for this, there's a low PPT count.) That's not so bad! I was a pretty good writer in high school. Better than a lot of adults. But it will go seriously downhill from here. Another two years and I'll be at 10th grade; two more and we'll be in middle school. Quickly we'll be in "Dick and Jane go up hill" territory.

I think, by the way, this is specific to intra-corporate use. Something about the highly concentrated jargon, shared assumptions, and positioning of cliches (verbal and visual) as a means of bludgeoning the decision-making apparatus into submission. Probably the decks you build for public presentations are safe. Probably.