My entire life has changed because of f.lux. I usually wake up before sunrise and when I don’t it’s because I have worked late into the night. Throughout the day f.lux adjusts the tints on my screen with based on my location and time of day. At night, my screen has a slight red-orange hue (tungsten) that keeps me from squinting at my computer and burning my eyeballs. Doing graphic design work that requires precise attention to detail and color? No problem, there’s an easily accessible feature to disable f.lux for an hour. If you try this for a week and still don’t love it, I’ll give you your money back!
Big surprise that I read a lot of news–from a lot of different sources. Blogs, journals, news sites and so on. Because the media industry wants us to click on more links, more share buttons and more ads we are bombarded with visual noise. Readability is a bookmarklet you can add to your toolbar that wipes all of that away. I dream of a day when design is so good we don’t need Readability. But until then, one click to quiet salvation is not so bad.
This is way I wish all technology worked, quietly in the background. The one click Chrome extension makes all New York Times stories one page. You know that 12-page essay about lemon farming in Brazil? While you’re clicking next, next next, I’m smooth sailing down down the coast Rio sipping lemonade and not a penny spent. I wish I had this for the entire internet.
New York Times Standard vs New York Times with Adblocker
I did some browser to browser comparisons and the free Adblock definitely works. It also apparently it won the about.com Reader’s Choice Award in 2011–for what that’s worth to you. My favorite part is no longer having twirling, dancing motion ads crying for attention. Hulu ads got you down? Try pressing the “mute” button; that trick always works.
There is an remarkable amount of opportunity to do game changing work in the journalism space. There always has been and there always will be. Why? Because there will always be uncovered stories, truths and narratives to be told. There are always people, problems and more than two sides to an issue.
I’ll start by telling you about my transition from being a news designer to interaction designer. Then I’ll talk about visual.ly at large.
I’ve been asked how I made the leap from one field to the other. Really, folks, they are one in the same to me. Both roles share the same toolbelt: sketch, iterate, prototype, reflect, tell stories, interview, explore, think big, collaborate, write and design at all fidelities.
People ask me why I made the leap
Why did I jump the journalism ship? For me, there really was no other choice. I wanted to improve the quality of how we learn about what’s happening in our world, what I think news does. To do this, I needed new tools in my tool design belt. So, I went back to graduate school to study HCI.
The other reason I jumped ship is actually quite sad. I tried and tried and tried to motivate digital approaches at various media organizations I worked for–not just one in particular. And my freshly graduated tech savvy peer/colleague journalist friends were all trying to do the same thing. Some have been successful. But most of us realized weren’t going to get anywhere until publishers were willing to invest in the future of digital, in a real, thoughtful, way.
Sure the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and other major news hubs pump out fantastic digital work. But we don’t talk as much about solutions for readers of all the gazettes, journals and couriers across the country. That’s why creating a platform can be so powerful.
I wasn’t going to make progress any time soon in the old boys club, so, I jumped. I didn’t want to spend any more time commemorating the good ol’ days, I wanted to design for the future.
Do I look back? Of course. Do I want to go back? No. Am I obsessively grateful for all of the brilliant mentors and experiences I’ve had? Of course.
People ask why I went to graduate school
In my grad school application I said I wanted to work on the news problem. I said I would graduate and leave the traditional news community for a while and arm myself with education and experience at smart tech companies. And when the timing and opportunity is right, I would work in this opportunity space again. I had a really nice metaphor with light and darkness.
People are doing things outside journalism that benefit media
I’m writing this post today because it relates to visua.ly which has me oozing with excitement.
Watch their demo at 500 startups. Scrub to about 34 minutes in.
The cofounders, Stewart Langille and Lee Sherman come most recently from Mint.com, the infographic heaven for visualized data about your money. They are taking advantage of a space and area that has never been more important and had more opportunity. Watch the video and see how they view the future.
They are trying to solve the problem of “big data” and are “targeting publishing and advertising.” A publisher has a monthly with subscription with Visual.ly which connect them with third party data sets, designers, analysts and an an editor who oversees the creations of these visualizations.
I’ve said this many times before, and I’ll say it again, if journalists in newsrooms don’t take serious, thoughtful action to move the news industry forwards, other people will. Quoting myself:
Newspapers, radio and cable television should be taught in media history classes. Students should be taught to produce for and think about Mobile apps, Google and Apple TV, Ubiquitous Computing, Virtual Environments, Chat clients, Facebook, Twitter, Bloggers, GPS devices, etc. The list goes on and on. If the medium is the message, it’s time to open our eyes to everything else out there.
We should have invented Twitter. We should have invented RSS feeds. We should have invented Craigslist and Groupon and Youtube and the iPad and Google Search and Yelp. It’s okay to hire developers. It’s okay to take a risk. If people inside the news industry don’t change the model, people outside will.
10 August 2010
Visual.ly “gives publishers the horse power of a New York Times visualization team without the cost; New York Times has 40 people on their visualization.” It’s curated crowdsourcing. “Using our data, or their own, users can grab-and-go making amazing visualizations” the founders say.
So, to my dear friends in newsrooms, fighting the good fight, every day, whatever you do, keep moving forward. If your editor is not taking advantage of your potential, work for someone who will. If no one will, start doing whatever you think needs to be done, yourself.
Light and happy on my feet, upon arrival in Barcelona (2007).
I don’t check luggage and I love developers. I’ll tell you what the two have to do with each other.
I came across a wonderful post about travelling without baggage. It highlights 4 ways to travel light: bring nothing, fill only your pockets, keep only a day bag or borrow everything you need. He says:
I’ve done it. Traveling with no bags is gloriously liberating. You move fast, close to the ground, spontenously. You feel unleashed, undefined by your possessions. It is just you and the world. I am convinced that you think different when you have less stuff to manage. You learn a lot, fast.
Many of those same ideals are celebrated in recent posts I have read about lean ux (a method for interaction designers). It is reflective of agile development methods and a step forward from the slow waterfall process.
Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.
So what can travelers and designers learn from one another?
Be lightweight. Be agile and quick on your feet. Limiting yourself to physical artifacts (wireframes or big bags) plant you to the ground and can limit your scope
Be aware. Continuously be in a meditative, reflective state where you are learning from yourself, your environment, the people around you and your process. Then, obviously, iterate. Do whatever you were doing before, better, or at least differently if it wasn’t working.
Be flexible and open. Writing a committed, formal plan before the actual process begins detracts from the opportunity to discover the unknown and unexplored.
Spend time and money only on the essentials. Living with little or no waste often lends itself to having more time, energy and money for what and when it is most important.
Learn the local language. Do as the Romans…or the ruby developers…do. Immerse yourself in the environment. Learn it, live it, and use what you already know to make smart decisions.
Focus on experience. Do this for your journey, or the people you are designing for will have. Experience shall be a high priority.
If you can do a week in a backpack, you can do a month. If you can do a month, you can do a year. I once went somewhere with only a purse. I’d like to take on the travel bloggers’ challenge and bring nothing with me at all. I’m working on a non-smelly solution.
As for lean ux? I’m cutting the fat a little bit each and every day. But it’s really going to take a team effort.
A great post from thingist with an articulate reminder that we are all in this together. When we lose sight of what we’re doing, the people we make things for often suffer the most–and isn’t that contrary to the whole point to begin with? Helping each other out rather than ripping a new one every here or there can’t hurt.
My fellow nerds, geeks, hackers, designers, makers, builders, and DIYers, there is something very very wrong with out culture right now. We’re jackasses to one another.
…
Except nobody told me that I sucked at skateboarding, or that my form was terrible, or that I should give up on it. In fact quite the opposite. One day at the skatepark I was sitting off to the side just watching everybody else and kindof wishing that I wasn’t there. One of my best friends, Steve, came up to me to ask what I was doing.
“You’re not going to learn anything by just staring at that thing. If I ever catch you sitting on this bench again, you’re not invited to the skatepark anymore.”
However, there is also a place for tough love and an honest, constructive critqiue.
Experiences belong to the people having them. Designers do not own the experience. Designers are not god and designers cannot design an experience someone else is going to have. The experience belongs to the person (or people). There inlies the ownership.
I have been looking at a lot of portfolios, business cards, blog posts, tweets and job descriptions. “I design experiences” is a phrase that really bugs me. With all the tooting and fan faring about ‘user centered design’ and putting people first, it is awfully bold for a designer, developer or manager to claim they will decide and thereby design what kind of experience someone else will have. How can we possibly define their emotions, their thoughts, their environment, their fears, their childhood memories, their little delights? Have we lost all sense of humbleness and humility?
However, experience is a very important element to consider, if not an essential part of a design framework, philosophy or value. The experience people have using a product or service is what I care about. Well, let’s also not forget all the people whom our work effects that are not necessarily users. I bet that is something ringtone designers think a lot about, the non-users. Anyone notice how the chimes and bells have gotten more office friendly? The dude in the cubicle next to you is a non-user but certainly effected by that ringtone. But, I digress. Perhaps we can design for an experience. The difference is humble intent.
Human behavior never ceases to surprise me. People will always use tools and services in a way we may not expect. We’re humans, we appropriate. And if we do indeed appropriate, how can anyone other than you ultimately decide what experience you will have?
Some designers all in a huff about a post written on fast company arguing against user-led innovation. It’s flying through my Twitter stream and just came into my inbox via my dear friend and Poynter colleague Jose Kusunoki. He sent it out to our Poynter list-serve asking what we thought about the following quote.
The Apple and IKEA way
Take Apple. One evening, well into the night, we asked some of our friends on the Apple design team about their view of user-centric design. Their answer? “It’s all bullshit and hot air created to sell consulting projects and to give insecure managers a false sense of security. At Apple, we don’t waste our time asking users, we build our brand through creating great products we believe people will love.”
Below is my critique on the commentary folks are making about the post, rather than the post itself. In short, all I’m trying to say is, calm down.
I think a lot of things about this. It’s passing like wild-fire through my twitter stream right now. First of all, not every company is, can be and should be like Apple.
Building brand and product are certainly related but are not the same thing. In this post,it seems the two words are being used interchangeably. The writer here also is confusing user-centered and user-led. Attention to brand, identity, marketing, product, design, motion, function and many other elements are crucial. They live together in an ecology. But they are not all the same thing.
User-led design puts a product in front of some people, they give feedback and you redesign based on their feedback. Crudely, you could say it disregards the judgement of the designer.
User-centered, however, in my opinion, designs for the need, pain points, problems, pleasures and other elements per required by the user, and many other factors. This method considers feedback from users. But feedback, research and findings are one element of many qualitative and quantitative data points that inform the design. Along with, yes, judgement from the creators of the product or service (designers, developers, managers, etc).
One is designed for users. One is designed by users. I advocate for the first, this post and possibly Apple seems to be arguing against the second.
We’re not god. We’ll never know how people are going to understand, interpret or use the things we design. Did anyone know newspapers would make awesome hats in the rain? No. But turns out, they do.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how natural lanuage processing can be used (better) in news. How could we use social data and NLP to personalize and individualize news content to answer the question “so what?”
Broadcasting stories to social media has led to the emergence of social journalism.
Social Journalism (definition in progress)
Social Journalism is the practice of broadcasting a news story with commentary to a social network. The social journalist practices writing, editing, judgement, authority, attention to audience .
Argument The social journalist does not necessary practice news gathering and fact checking like a news journalist does. This person scrutinizes text and through their horizons, interpretation and the context of their lifeworld, they comment on the content in the context of ‘convention, reception and interpretation’ in a social way, as Barnard says in his book Visual Culture.
Commentary I’m in the process of brainstorming for a paper I am writing. In my research, I have found that people who share and comment on news stories to their social networks and news journalists have many things in common. This paper will argue for the emergence of the social journalist and will explore how sharing UI on news sites have enabled this emergence. This paper will also acknowledge the differences between news journalist and social journalist. Social media and its integration with news media, for the first time ever, has empowered the lay person for to be not only a consumer, but also to produce content and easily broadcast to mass communities.
Sharing a news story usually seems like simply flicking a click of a button, scribbling out a quick thought and going about your merry way.
But news consumers, who once, were only news consumers are now also producers. Beyond the blogger, only recently has design and technology facilitated the tools to empower the lay consumer to interact with content in a creative way. They are now work as editors, writers and broadcasters, in their own social right.
John McCarthy and Peter Wright compose a fantastic book on experience design, Technology as Experience. “Experience is ever present,” they say. “We are always engaged in experience even when we are trying to stand back from it to describe it.” McCarthy and Wright reaffirm how it important it is to think about and the holistic experience of anything when designing, and in this case, sharing a news story.
Browsing through news stories is absolute active participation. Unlike watching news TV or even reading a print publication, the reader has choice more choice between on and off or skim or not skim. In the current content consuming paradigm, beyond a news summary, the reader must actively decide to click, and almost navigate to a new page to get immersed into a story. It takes a significantly greater commitment. The reader then must actively make a judgement, “do I want to consider reading this article?” If yes, they click, if no, they keep skimming headlines and photos.
This is the first step of what I’m referring to as an editing process, where the reader is flexing their judgement skills. Moving forward, they continue to do this when they’ve consumed enough of the article or graphic and decides to share it. Only now, after all of these hurdles, have they come to the act of sharing something. That standing on the assumption that the sharing interface (and logging in process for that matter) is seamlessly easy to understand.
If the article inspires and resonates with the reader, it’s likely it has a high share-ability. That or it speaks to the readers’ audience, the audience that is comprised of their network. Of course, considering, most people don’t think about the Facebook News Feed is developed in such a way that it’s difficult to overshare to your network, according to Aditya Agarwal, Facebook’s Director of Engineering. Though, they are hoping people will learn and stop worrying about overshare.
In Erik Stolterman’s book, Imagination and Communication, he talks about imagination and communication. The reader takes ideas from their minds eye and must make it communicable, he says, which is part of the creative process.
Once the reader has read the article and formed some kind of thought and new meaning, it still exists in their mind, in their imagination. Once they have taken that vision, explored and then written their thoughts, they have led to “new truths” cited to Erik Stolterman. Their new truths, that are “possible to share with other people.”
And beyond all of this, conscious or not, these readers are engaging in civic and cultural participation, which Jean Burgess, author of Vernacular Creativity cites.
Culture is the means by which we, as individual citizens and communities, experience what the world is like, how we fit in it, and importantly, how we relate to others who are different from us at the same time as we seek out opportunities for belonging.
Where participatory media opens up space for us, as ordinary citizens, to speak and represent ourselves and our ways of being in the world, and to encounter difference, then it’s also a space for the everyday practice of cultural citizenship in that context, everyday creativity is civic engagement, in a sense.
It is not even the writing process itself here that is creative and expressive. It is the development of new truths, personal meaning and broadcasting in a cultural context to an audience, especially at such a mass scale, that has never been done before. Participating in every day media, like Burgess says, helps us develop our own identities, how we see ourselves and how we fit into our worlds. All the while we are making judgements about the what the people in our networks share, say do, and don’t do and how they fit into the world. That has always been a part of civic engagement.
When designing a share UI, designers must consider:
The overall experience from arriving to the article in the first place. How did the reader get here? RSS, Website, another shared link? Think about where they are coming and possibly where they are going afterwards.
Consider when they are likely going to want to share.
Design the UI with enough space that supports an emergent writing and editing process, like a resizable window.
Think of the reader as a media producer. Is your share UI a pop up or modal dialoge? Will they lose everything they wrote if they go to reread a section of text, navigate to a new site to get some information or another link or copy and paste something?
Reduce the amount of choices they must make. The New York Times does a nice job giving commentary a high position in the visual hierarchy, while still giving their consumer/producers the autonomy to hit recommend without saying a word, which still says something.
Below are my favorite bits of technology that make life less complicated and truly better. Happy reading.
