Dan Cederholm is the brilliant mind behind Bulletproof Web Design and Web Standards Solutions and he’s bringing his highly acclaimed talk, “Interface Design Juggling,” to An Event Apart’s Chicago stage. We took a few minutes to dig deeper into what’s going on with Dan these days and what he’ll have in store for us.

Coming soon: Better Know A Speaker interviews with Lou Rosenfeld, Jeremy Keith, Liz Danzico, Luke Wroblewski, and more!

Tags: aneventapart, simplebits, cederholm, dancederholm, aeachicago2007

Filed under: better-know-a-speaker, Chicago, css, people, industry, aneventapart, design

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“The Dark Side of the ‘Citizen Media’ Revolution”

“Blogs—the primary engine of Web 2.0’s so-called ‘citizen media’ revolution—are ten years old this week,” says Andrew Keen. Mine’s over twelve, but who’s counting? (And how can something that old be called Web 2.0, anyway? But I digress.) Keen fears that unmediated publishing, made possible by the web, is lowering the quality of discourse. To oversimplify (but only a bit), “professional” writer + editor + publisher = good for civilization; Jane Smith + WordPress = bad for civilization. The idea that the two conversations might enrich each other eludes Keen. Coincidentally, he has a book on the subject.

Mahalo - “first human-powered search engine”

Currently in Alpha, whatever that still means, Muhalo (Hawiian for “Thank you”) wants to be a hybrid of Google and Wikipedia. Whether these two ways of finding and learning can be combined by a volunteer community is the noble and exciting experiment Mahalo will perform. My Mahalo profile, written by Dave, seems pretty good for a start. Suggestion: encoding ampersands to create valid URLs on “return” links would be a nice (and easy) minor technical improvement. Hat tip: Daniel Schutzsmith.

Diagonal Stripe Background Generator

Satire of an exhausted “Web 2.0″ visual trend, or useful graphic design tool? It’s both! Ajax-powered visual design tool lets you create, preview, and download seamless, striped background images, with or without gradients.

Tartan maker

Still using diagonal stripes? Get with it. Generate seamless tartan patterns for all your Web 3.0 needs.

Requirements? That’s Sooo ’90s

“Usability and accessibly must be passive to be truly successful. No requirements, no rules, no instructions.”

Supermoxie

Fine adult and children’s book illustration by Jena Scott.

Film Techniques of Alfred Hitchcock

Top 13 basic film techniques of Alfred Hitchcock. The audience is pulled in by eyes, camera, distractions, point of view, montage, simplicity, ironic characters, dual actions, MacGuffins, etc. Every visual storyteller should know these principles. Via Kottke.

Ugly Airline Math: Planes Late, Fliers Even Later – New York Times

Statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays—those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights—involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted.

exPhone

Recycle or help someone reuse your old cell phone (AKA mobile phone).

Recycle Your iPod or Cell Phone

From Apple. Like it says. Free.

iPhone: The Music Video

Twittered by millions. New York Times technology columnist (and former off-Broadway pianist/conductor) David Pogue dumps his old mobile for the iPhone in this sing-a-long video, set to the strains of “My Way.” It shines brightest when folks in line at the Apple Store start belting out the refrain. P.S. What’s up with the boat boy?

ZOMG! Spare me the POSH acronyms, please!

Ara Pehlivanian’s well-reasoned rant against the rebranding of semantic HTML. Minus the anger and hyperbole, I agree with him.

R.I.P. Kramer

No, not the fictional character played by racial harmony guru Michael Richards. Kramer was a great WordPress plug-in that found incoming links to your site’s posts and printed them in your comments field. Alas, a few days ago, Kramer began time-stamping all such links December 31st, 1969 at 3:58 pm in place of their actual publication dates. Not only did this strew one’s site with factual inaccuracies, it also had the effect of sticking rudimentary inbound link text at the top of every comment column, since comments publish from oldest to most recent, and no comment will ever be older than December 31st, 1969. When obvious potential remedies such as emptying the cache failed to correct the problem, I (and presumably every other Kramer user who’s awake) disabled Kramer. The program has not been updated since 2005. Perhaps some nice person will fix it. If not, R.I.P. and thanks for the good years.

Tags: POSH, kramer, exphone, keen, britannica, search, searchengine, wiki, google, wikipedia, mahalo, recycle, iphone, ipod, recycling, hitchcock, apple, design, webdesign, accessibility, backgrounds, patterns, tiles, diagonal, tartan, generator, ajax, tile, maker, creator, web2.0, stripes, diagonal, diagonal stripes

Filed under: film, links, tools, design

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And we hope you’ll take it. Happy Cog Philadelphia seeks a fabulous project manager. Must communicate superbly, value great work and great client relationships, respect deadlines and the creative process, enjoy Basecamp and love Philadelphia. Details are available on the 37signals Job Board.

Filed under: jobs, work, happycog

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We are still crunching numbers on the Web Design Survey—with over 32,000 responses to 36 questions, there’s a lot to crunch. But in one area, preliminary data supports what anecdotal experience led us to expect: almost no one who makes websites works in their company or organization’s web division. That’s because almost no company or organization has a web division. And that void on the org chart is one reason we have so many bloated, unusable failures where we should be producing great user experiences.

Ponder. No matter how critical the web experience may be to the organization’s mission, the people who design and build those mission-critical sites work in divisions that have nothing to do with the web, and report to leaders whose expertise is unrelated to web design and development.

It’s a startling fact with profound implications—and as such has gone unnoticed by the business community and press.

IT or marketing

From law firms to libraries, from universities to Fortune 500 companies, the organization’s website almost invariably falls under the domain of the IT Department or the Marketing Department, leading to turf wars and other predictable consequences. While many good (and highly capable) people work in IT and marketing, neither area is ideally suited to craft usable websites or to encourage the blossoming of vital web communities.

Competent IT departments handle a dazzling array of technical challenges requiring deep, multi-leveled expertise. But tasks such as equipping 20,000 globally dispersed employees with appropriately configured PCs, or maintaining corporate databases and mail gateways, don’t necessarily map to the skills required to design great user experiences for the web.

Large-scale systems expertise takes a different mindset than what’s needed to write usable guide copy, finesse markup semantics, or design an easy-to-understand user interface employing the lightest and fewest possible graphic images. Moreover, nimble development and support for open standards are not the hallmarks of large IT departments (although undoubtedly there are noble exceptions). Additionally, developers with a background in IT (again, with some exceptions) tend to create from the point of view of technology, rather than that of the user.

What about Marketing?

Organizations that don’t entrust their website to IT tend to hand it to Marketing. The rationale for doing so is easy to see: Marketing has been briefed on the organization’s business goals (at least for the next quarter), and the division is staffed by communications specialists who know at least something about writing and art direction. If nothing else, they know who to hire to write their copy, and they are comfortable telling the in-house graphic designers to make the logo bigger.

Like IT, Marketing has valuable organizational knowledge (plus certain skills) to contribute to any serious web enterprise. The leaders of Marketing, like the leaders of IT, should be frequently consulted in any web effort. But the skills of Marketing, like the skills of IT, don’t necessarily map to what is needed to create great web experiences.

For one thing, as anyone reading this knows, the web is a conversation. Marketing, by contrast, is a monologue. It can be a great monologue—for examples of which, see The One Show Winners or the AIGA Design Archives. But a monologue and conversation are not the same, as an hour spent with your windy Uncle Randolph will remind you.

And then there’s all that messy business with semantic markup, CSS, unobtrusive scripting, card-sorting exercises, HTML run-throughs, involving users in accessibility, and the rest of the skills and experience that don’t fall under Marketing’s purview.

If not them, then who?

Business and non-profit decision makers, for your users’ good, consider this request. Stop separating the members of your web team. Cease distributing them among various (often competitive) divisions led by people with limited web expertise. Let the coders, designers, writers, and others charged with creating and maintaining your web presence work together. Put them in a division that recognizes that your site is not a bastard of your brochures, nor a natural outgrowth of your group calendar. Let there be web divisions.

Tags: webdesign, webdevelopment, design, development, web divisions

Filed under: community, business, project management, essentials, usability, development, standards, industry, design

This post has earned 51 responses so far.

As law, “Speed Limit 55 MPH” is enforceable. “Don’t drive too fast” is not. Although heeded by too few U.S. web teams, W3C accessibility standards are the law in many nations. That’s one reason the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has been under pressure to increase the specificity and clarity—and thus the enforceability—of its guidelines.

Because organizations must be able to state positively whether or not they have complied with a legally mandated guideline, the Working Group has introduced the notion of “testability” in its new WCAG 2.0 documents. In place of vague guidlines like, “Ensure sufficient contrast between foreground and background,” WCAG 2.0 provides technical specifications that can be measured by machines.

The trouble is, some criteria are inherently untestable, argues former working group invited expert Gian Sampson-Wild in Issue No. 240 of A List Apart for people who make websites. Rather than admit the problem and rethink testability, says Sampson-Wild, WCAG 2.0 jettisons needed guidelines that cannot be defined in a testable manner. In so doing, she claims, WCAG 2.0 hurts the very people it is intended to help.

Read Testability Costs Too Much and decide for yourself. Then share your comments with the W3C. The deadline for comments is 29 June 2007. That’s right, three days from now. So please read, think, and decide.

Also in this issue, new A List Apart author Sharon Lee discusses using linear and non-linear narrative and other techniques of engagement to create a rich, sensory experience that immerses people in your website, encouraging deeper involvement with your message and brand.

The principles of good human-to-computer interface design are simplicity, support, clarity, encouragement, satisfaction, accessibility, versatility, and personalization. While it’s essential to heed these, it’s also important to empathize with and inspire your audience so they feel you’re treating them less like a faceless user and more like a human being.

Find out more in Human-to-Human Design.

Issue No. 240 also brings back Joe Clark’s absolutely essential 22 August 2005 piece, Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility:

Contrary to popular opinion—and also contrary to quasi-judicial claims in some places—PDF documents can be no less accessible than HTML. … This article will explain how PDF does and does not support accessibility.

All this, plus the painfully brilliant and hilariously insightful illustrations of ALA artist and rock star Kevin Cornell. And ALA T-Shirts on sale cheap. What more, we ask, could you ask?

Comments off. (Comment at ALA.)

Tags: alistapart, accessibility, design, wcag, wcag2, pdf

Filed under: publishing, accessibility, a list apart, design

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By popular demand, here’s most of the music that played between sessions at An Event Apart Seattle 2007 (requires iTunes). The complete playlist can be viewed on iLike.

Tags: aneventapart, imix, itunes, music, mixes

Filed under: aneventapart, music

This post has earned 13 responses so far.

When I’m planning an event, and I use a web service like evite® to send invitations, that web service offers three choices:

1. Yes, I’ll come
2. No, I won’t
3. Maybe—I’m not sure

“Maybe” is one option too many. As a best practice, we should dispense with it, just as we should replace five-star rating systems with four-star ones.

The problem with five-star rating systems

Let users choose from five stars, and they nearly always pick three. Three is the little bear’s porridge, neither too hot nor too cold. Three is neutral—a safe place to hide. Even in the virtual world, where nothing more consequential is being asked than an opinion, many people would rather equivocate than commit.

But present these same users with a four-star spread and you leave them no cover. Two stars out of four is not neutral. Neither is three stars out of four. Any star rating they choose will reflect an actual opinion. There is no place to hide. When there is no place to hide, courage arises out of necessity. Force people out of the brush, and they develop the backbone needed to state an opinion.

The trouble with “maybe”

As data, “maybe” is as useless as a three-star rating in a five-star system—and as hypnotically compelling to users. “Maybe” is a button that begs to be pushed.

Maybe is a magnet for neuroses. It salves guilt complexes and incites passive-aggressive avoidance behaviors.

“Maybe” sometimes means maybe, but it can also mean, “I’m not coming but I don’t want to hurt your feelings.” Or even, “I plan to come but I reserve the right to change my mind at the last minute if something better comes along.” Some people even use maybe to mean, “I won’t make dinner but I’ll come for dessert.”

When you invite twelve people to a restaurant dinner via a web service, at least four will say maybe. Do you reserve a table for twelve? When eight show up and range themselves at opposite ends of the table (”because other people might be joining us”) you have an awkward table filled with gaps. The empty seats haunt the meal, suggesting social failure.

But if you call the restaurant at the last minute to change the reservation to eight, two of the maybes will show up, like ants at a picnic. They’ll have nowhere to sit, and they’ll blame you. (”I told you I might come.”)

How can you know what “maybe” means? In the context of a web service, you can’t. All you can do is phone people and ask whether they’re leaning toward coming or not—in other words, try to move them from a five-star three to a four-star two or three. If they’re the passive-aggressive type, they will continue to evade the snare of commitment. “I’m probably coming,” they’ll say.

What is the solution? Use web services that offer a binary choice: “I’m coming” or “I’m not coming.” If you can’t find such a service, build one. If you run a web service that includes “maybe,” offer an optional two-choice (”no-maybe”) version.

When demand an outright yes or no, people generally supply it. They only equivocate when handed the means to do so. Form is content.

Tags: design, usability, invitations, fourstar, fivestar, rating systems

Filed under: business, essentials, usability, tools, design

This post has earned 65 responses so far.

My body insists it’s 10:30 at night, but the sun tells a different story. That orb has barely begun to set over Puget Sound, whose ripples magnify and fragment its blinding whiteness. The sun and its watery reflection are all I can see from my waterside hotel window. This is Seattle and I’ve come here to put on a show.

Tags: aneventapart, seattle, beatles, pugetsound

Filed under: Seattle, cities, aneventapart

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A Business Week slide show, “Thinking Outside the Design Box,” profiles “10 professionals working at the very edges of their disciplines in order to redefine their industries.” Included are designers Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram, who helped design the interface for One Laptop Per Child; Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar; and (ulp!) me.

I’m in there because they needed a pretty face, and because of the whole web standards thing.

The piece is part of “Cutting-Edge Designers 2007,” a Business Week Special Report focusing on innovation that arises out of crossing disciplines and combining technologies.

It’s worth reading, which is lucky, because I would have blogged it no matter what.

Tags: design, innovation, businessweek, designers, zeldman

Filed under: zeldman.com, zeldman, w3c, 12 years, aneventapart, work, standards, industry, a list apart, happycog, design

This post has earned 13 responses so far.

A reminder for people who make websites: if you forget to set your site’s background color, your visitors may set it for you.

In three minutes, I found three sites that forgot this basic rule of web design. Set your browser’s background color to something heinous (I chose magenta) and click around the web. You may be surprised. Don’t forget to check your own site!

Tags: bgcolor, webdesign, color, yahoo!, segura-inc, 800flowers

Filed under: css, essentials, development, design

This post has earned 50 responses so far.