I wasn’t expecting in-depth critique. I wasn’t quite sure where I was going wrong, and some gut reactions on what might be the problem was the kind of feedback I really wanted.

What I was surprised to receive was quite a few responses just telling me exactly what to do. This wasn’t ‘feedback’, it was direction. There is a great difference between someone asking ‘why’ and someone asking ‘how’. Design critiques aim to give the receiver a wider understanding of their work, and design in general, there really are no magic rules in design whereby you follow them and your project becomes an instant ‘success.’

How I encouraged poor feedback

A critique isn’t all in what the other side says to you. In order to allow the ‘giver’ to deliver useful feedback, you need to explain the context of the work. Very rarely does design work stand without requiring any explanation. The more the giver understands about your work, the greater insight they are likely to give you.

There are numerous elements that may have affected your outcome and will need explaining to the giver so that they might understand your decisions (and these are just a few!):

• the client
• the audience
• your task as a designer
• your role within the team (if any)
• any constraints
• what you aim to achieve

Also, when presenting your work it may help to give your justification behind the design of particular elements that stand out. If you think someone is likely to comment on it, and you can see the problem, then explain it so that people can help you with that problem rather than just telling you something you already know.

This doesn’t mean start with a load of excuses! Often I’m inclined to say “the client told me to do this, and I don’t really want to argue with them…” which is really an excuse for me not standing up for my design work or my principles.

Giving useful feedback

Most important when giving useful feedback is trying to understand the context of the project. It’s ok to ask questions before giving any advice! If someone has asked for your opinion, then they are likely to value it, but this does not mean that you should blindly give feedback without understanding the work.

The design is the designer’s project. They may be sharing their work with you, but they ask for feedback in the hope of understanding better how to improve their work, not to be told what to do. The key to this is really trying to concentrate on understanding the problems together as best you possibly can, rather than offering quick solutions.

However this doesn’t mean that it’s bad to help the designer with ideas. Try to give examples to help illustrate potential solutions, but always back these up with rationalisation, and the reason *why* you think this would work.

Always be honest, but polite. Egos are no use in critiques, but you don’t want to upset people. Those cruel art school scenarios may be good for destroying the ego that is overly protective of their work, but in a working situation we’re not out to hurt each other. If you find it difficult to honestly convey negative opinions, for fear of hurting a sensitive person, try sandwiching the negative between positive feedback. Negative feedback is definitely more useful, but it can be heartening for a struggling designer to hear the elements of their work that are successful.

Receiving feedback

Listen listen listen. Forget that ego in the back of your mind that is automatically coming up with defensive excuses and try to *learn* from the experience. People are taking the time to help you, it is only polite to listen to what they have to say.

Take note of everything they tell you, even if you don’t understand it or think it is right. You may come to understand later, and it’s not necessarily the comment that is useful, but the interpretation of your work that helps you understand how potential users may see your designs.

If you keep getting the same comments over and over again, don’t dismiss the additional comments as unhelpful. One person may have further insight, and the fact that so many people are reinforcing the same point should really hammer home any improvements you need to make.

Not having an art education isn’t the end of the world

If you know me, then chances are you’ll have heard me rant about my experiences in formal art/design education. Needless to say, it isn’t always a positive way to start your design career, and I fear it is often a source of snobbery in the design/web design industry.

This kind of education may give people a head-start in critiques because they’ve taken part before, but that really is the only head-start. How does anyone get experience asides from trying something for themselves?

I love Martin’s idea of meeting up for group critiques. I think it would be something that could benefit a lot of designers if we do it regularly, and get an opportunity to understand each other and our ways of working better. So if anyone is local-ish to the Surrey area (and I’m willing to travel for this kind of interaction!) please let me know. For those of us who are also frequent conference attendees, maybe we should have post-conference crits together?! Let’s get on with it!

The topic of naïvety in user experience first came up in Aral Balkan‘s brilliant opening keynote, but using it as an approach it was an ongoing theme through the week, summed up by Josh Clark:

Advice from @aral: Be naive. From @aarron: Be childlike. From Steve: Stay foolish. From me: Play more video games. #FILive

May 2nd, 2012 11:45 pm via globalmoxie.comReplyRetweetFavorite

@globalmoxie

Josh Clark

Aral spoke about staying naïve in order to identify with a user who comes to your product afresh. It’s hard for somebody working on user experience to un-learn everything they know, but in order to create an experience that will be useful, and preferably enjoyable, for the user requires fresh eyes.

Thinking around this, I was considering another ongoing discussion that’s really been around for ages. Web vs. native, apps vs. sites. The evolution of the discussion in itself is definitely a blog post for sometime soon, but it was frequently the approaches of those involved in the conversation that made me consider the value of naïvety.

Now I’m not claiming to be objective in the argument of web vs. native, I work with the web, and therein lies my natural bias. It’s very difficult as a creator to not favour the tool that you work with the most. Both web developers and native app developers are frequently guilty of considering each new project as a nail because they’ve got a web or native hammer that’s particularly comfortable to use.

As problem solvers, we need step back from our tools of choice, often also being what will make us money, and try to objectively decide what will solve the problem most effectively and efficiently. We need a naïvety that makes us untainted by our previous experiences.

Ultimately we need to learn the separation between what are really standards and conventions that can assist the user in their learning process, and understanding our own experience that is clouding our judgment and making us expect the user to think in the same way that we do.

Being open-minded is difficult, we’re constantly faced with our own experiences on which we can base grudges, evangelism and every possible opinion in between. But this discussion on web vs. native has made me think that, whilst experience can work in our favour, we must be careful that it doesn’t work against us. Next time we’re arguing for or against a platform/approach/ideology, we need to consider whether we’re using our experience to judge or if it’s just bias.

I’m now on board with uBelly to cover conferences and other webby stuff. This post is very much the same style as my previous digest posts, but on a different site.

Mobile design and development has gained momentum over the last few years; with responsive design and designers regularly going giddy over iPhone app UIs, it’s surprising how little the industry discusses the design issues. We seem to prefer to get caught up in the more technical and development-based conversations (or the infuriatingly dull native vs web, but I’ll get back to that!)

Luke Wroblewski’s Mobile First makes for a refreshing change. Luke talks about designing for mobile experiences. He shares case studies and ideas behind UI design, including loads of concepts that had never even crossed my (admittedly slightly limited) mind. (Should the navigation be moved to the bottom of the page on mobile screens so it doesn’t get in the way of the main page content?!)

If you work for a company or clients who are reluctant to consider mobile solutions, this book is perfect for you. Luke arms you with stats aplenty to back up why the mobile experience is a very current issue and the immense gains that can be had by paying attention to smaller screens. I’m lucky to work with clients who consider mobile as important as the desktop experience, but I still found these statistics valuable in reminding me why I bother!

As a (perhaps-overly) frequent attendee of conferences, I’m sick of the “native vs web” debate (panel go-to question where the answer is always ‘it depends on the context!’) Fortunately, Luke is very much agnostic to web or device in this book, discussing the merits of both in depth, but then showing design approaches that would work equally well on the web or in a native app.

And of course, there is the very important concept of Mobile First. A principle I had first learnt about on the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices course, which has such a positive impact on design with minimal negatives. The ideas that making your content suitable for mobile consumption will make it a better experience for desktop users, and that mobile first results in lightweight (both visually and technically) pages that are easy to download and browse are impossible to argue against. You’ll come out of this book feeling as much an evangelist of the mobile first approach as Luke himself.

As with other A Book Apart Books, Mobile First is written in a light, readable style with a good dose of humour. Even with all the stats and graphs, each chapter is a breeze and I really enjoyed the whole book.

Designing For Emotion is the third book I’ve read in my read-a-chapter-a-day-for-inspiration series. I write this on a train journey after greedily guzzling the last three chapters in one go as I just couldn’t stop reading.

Aarron Walter writes in an incredibly easy style. His warm, friendly tone helps enthuse you about emotional design and gives you so much to think about beyond the old basic idea that 404 pages should be cute and funny to make your users more forgiving.

Arguably, this book is a lighter read than previous A Book Apart books which is really down to its subject matter. You’re given a real overview of designing for emotion and deeper case studies into how it has been practically applied to different sites but, as Aarron points out in Chapter 4:

The examples…are not meant to be emulated, only to get you thinking about how you can convey your brand personality in your interfaces in a way that resonates with your audience.

This means that, if you’re anything like me, you spend the whole book studying the ideas and working out how you can use similar approaches in your own projects.

Each chapter in Designing For Emotion takes you through a principle of emotional design:

1. Emotional Design (Intro/Overview)
2. Designing For Humans
3. Personality
4. Emotional Engagement
5. Overcoming Obstacles
6. Forgiveness
7. Risk & Reward

The Forgiveness chapter is more specific than others, focusing on evoking a particular emotion, but the content comes across as equally important as those in other chapters as it is such a necessary emotion to consider on the web where errors and poor performance can easily tempt users to look elsewhere.

Overall I found this book insanely inspirational. Partly because it’s a subject rarely covered in such depth and with so much consideration, but also because it’s almost exciting in its enthusiasm, making it easy to read quickly.

It took me a few reads to start getting into it. I haven’t been dedicating enough time to reading lately, so when I did it was stop-start and not concentrating properly, so I’ve decided to read a chapter a day. The idea behind this is to inspire me and set me up for the day’s work. It also allows me to catch up on my huge pile of unread books and learn a little on the way.

A Practical Guide to Designing the invisible was my first book to read in this way. It is perfectly divided into five parts, which allowed me to read it one-part-a-day each weekday last week. It took me around twenty to twenty-five minutes to read each part. These are:

1. Invisible communication 101
2. Following the right signs
3. Using the right palette
4. Using the correct language
5. Telling the best story

Each part is well-crafted; starting with a overview explaining why that area is an important part of designing a website, followed by more in-depth principles and examples, finished off with a real-life case study allowing the reader to see how those principles can be applied. The abstract-to-real-life structure combines theoretical and more practical information in an easy-to-digest way.

A Practical Guide to Designing the invisible is sold as a book aimed at beginners and non-designers:

This book is for design beginners. If you’re not a designer but sometimes are asked to do design, then this book is for you.

I’d agree that it is perfect for this audience, but Robert Mills doesn’t write in a basic way, and it certainly isn’t patronising. I was actually surprised at the amount of detail that Robert went into on some of the theory. For example, the section on semiotics was probably about as much depth as I learnt in my first year at university studying Digital Design/Graphic Communication. This continued through the book, it frequently reminded me of Graphic Design at university and college, but with that vital web context and angle. I think this book would be a perfect read for any designers looking to catch up on the theory they might have missed by not studying design, and any developers or business people wanting to better understand design from a designer’s point of view.

As a fairly experienced designer, and has had a more formal ‘design education’, I still found it valuable. It reminded me of the reasoning behind my design work. I think it gets to a point where some of your own design work can be on a subconscious ‘invisible’ level, and this helped me identify some of the principles I use every day, and how best I can explain and justify my design choices.

The only slight downside to A Practical Guide to Designing the invisible was the digital format. I can find it tricky to concentrate when reading on my desktop screen, as I get easily distracted by background tasks, but you can easily read this book across devices in the formats provided. The only downside to trying to read on other devices, particularly those with smaller screens, is that the layout of the book is very much designed for print. As a digital-only book, I feel it could have benefited from less margin space and a slightly larger x-height with a more hierarchical layout (fewer pull-outs), making the images more directly follow the relevant text to optimise for a screen-based reading experience.

In conclusion, it’s a good one, buy it! A book that covers web design well and doesn’t mention HTML and CSS is a rare find (this can date a book quickly and design principles can get lost in the markup) and I’ll definitely be recommending it to any future person who asks me what to read if they want to be a designer.

The abstract nature of the conference is part of the appeal for most people. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about a talk that is teaching you more practical techniques, such as writing HTML, when you can so easily learn about it on the web in your own time. Conferences that inspire your passion for the industry, exploring other disciplines and encouraging you to approach your everyday work from a different angle.

This does mean that the talks at dConstruct weren’t a straight-forward formula of “here’s a problem, here’s the answer.” Most talks were more a commentary, or train of thought, more about trying to identify ideas and issues, working towards solutions, than the “perfect fix” for all our problems.

Digital Products

The main theme of dConstruct this year was Designing Digital Products. For me, this seemed to be mostly covering digital products and our experiences with them, working on how to go beyond the usable (which is fortunately fast becoming the standard) to make these products truly personal, engaging and immersive.

The talks weren’t necessarily connected, but I found a lot of common threads throughout. This (slightly long!) post covers what I felt were the most prominent and meaningful themes. It’s about 15 minutes reading time, I think I should warn you!

• Beyond experiences
  • The emotional
  • Memories and augmented reality
  • Possessions and the personal, empowering users
• The value of systems
  • The diversity of systems
• Narratives
• The speed of technology
• Our digital past
  • Caring for our digital history
  • Understanding the preservation of artefacts and not just data
• In summary

Beyond experiences

In his opening talk, Don Norman spoke of how our products have evolved to be mostly about emotion and experience. Stephanie and Bryan Rieger expanded on that by discussing how we have to bear in mind that we are creating more than just experiences and that what we create now will define our future. On one hand, you may have no impact, but on the other hand you may have a huge impact and thus a huge responsibility.

Delight became a big part of describing how to go beyond a usable experience. Don Norman used an example from the OSX interface. The way that Safari scrolling gathers momentum and bounces when you hit the top or the bottom of the window at speed isn’t about function and usefulness, it’s just about fun. It’s the details creating fun and elegance that make the experience.

The emotional

Kelly Goto gave a fantastic talk from her position as a researcher, explaining how understanding the users/consumers’ lives is so important when creating products. Kelly spoke of she tries to understand what’s behind when someone says ‘I love it’ and how understanding people’s rituals can help you understand their priorities and how their experiences are connected.

Kelly’s company does research through contextual interviews, also known as ‘deep hanging out’ where they spend time with people to understand how products make them feel and how it helps them complete their tasks. It’s all about the context of people’s experiences and how understanding a situation can give you a completely different connection to an experience. She explained how these observations are one of the most effective forms of research and acts as the opposite of relying on statistical research such as analytics (and to a degree, focus groups.) Analytics and focus groups as forms of research can lack context and have results skewed as what people say is rarely what they actually do.

Kelly gave an example of a product that understands lifestyle; Withings’ scales aren’t ordinary scales, they tweet a user’s weight. This can help motivate the user and give them an experience that actually affects their life rather than just providing a utility service.

Unfortunately Kelly ran out of time so she had to very briefly cover some interesting topics that I would have loved to have heard in more depth. She started to talk about Kansei engineering, and how it ties in with creating more emotion-based product experiences through mixing sensory aspects with a logical experience.

Memories and augmented reality

Kelly Goto and Don Norman both spoke about making products addictive. Part of making products addictive, making the user want to return, is through making good memories of that product’s experience. Memories are actually more important than experiences because where experiences are brief, memories can last forever.

Design memories not experiences. Don Norman

Don Norman explained that the importance of memories is why we buy souvenirs and other memory-triggers such as photos, but the interesting part is that a memory isn’t necessarily true to reality. A memory can be like augmented reality, a skewed version of actually happened.

Kevin Slavin spoke about augmented reality and how it isn’t yet working as a genuine experience in the real world. Kevin’s main interest is in why we’re so desperate to create augmented reality and what it says about us.

Kevin explained how the working concept of augmented reality was created to assist workers in cabling to cable diagrams when working on Boeing planes. Having the cable diagrams mapped against the workers’ eyes allowed them to see where cables needed to be laid in real-space. This created the layer-like concept of augmented reality that we’re familiar with today in apps such as Layar.

The downside of layering replicant worlds to create augmented reality is that it makes the entire world feel less real and less immersive. It requires pointers in the augmented world to show users where to interact; this loses the magic compared to how everything is interactive in our real world.

Kevin pointed out that this is because we are confusing replication, looking like the real world, with immersion. This is particularly a problem as we as a species tend to find complete replication unsettling, which seems to be the case with human-replica robots. We forget that it isn’t looking human that makes something feel human. The brilliant examples that Kevin gave to explain this point was the Muppets or Tamagotchis. The Muppets are puppets that mostly don’t look like humans, but it’s their actions and their human-like personalities that make them seem real. Tamagotchis are just a few pixels, but they became like real pets to children. It wasn’t through good graphics or looking like real creatures, but by the way their behaved real, through having needs, desires and vulnerability. These attributions gave Tamagotchis a deeper sense of being alive.

Kevin summarised by saying that reality can be augmented, but not by adding a layer, and not through obsessing about optics. He likened augmented reality to porn, just a thin veneer of reality to fool the eyes.

Possessions and the personal, empowering users

Don Norman spoke about how digital products are changing to become more about co-creation and doing things yourself. This is changing the way products are made as people can easily make their own products as amateurs. The freedom of this technology and these platforms create infinite opportunities for creation, as well as giving people the power to do things for themselves that they couldn’t before. An example of this is blog platforms, where users can now publish for themselves.

Kelly Goto pointed out that customisation is a huge part of creating a good experience, being able to personalise what your possession does to express yourself. An example of this is in how huge the custom ringtone market is, where people strive to find the right ringtone to represent themselves or their friends.

Stephanie and Bryan Rieger suggested that user customisation and creation also reduce the requirements for a polished product. You can create something ‘perfect’ for your users, but it will only ever be perfect for that average, homogenised user. Many users would prefer something non-linear and ragged around the edges that they can refine and make suitable for themselves. This lack of perfection also allows users to mold and create their own experiences.

This idea of creating customised experiences has extended to whole services being based around the experiences of others’ products. Examples of these services are Readability and Instapaper, both apps making the reading of other people’s content a better experience.

The Riegers described how Apple spend a lot of time controlling experiences where other platforms, such as blogs and Twitter, are giving more freedom to users to publish their own content.

The best designs will set the stage, but stop short of fully defining the experience. Adam Silver

This breaking down of ownership has been enabled by the web. The Riegers explained how the web allows an idea to grow, almost organically or virus-like, independently from the original creator. Especially through open source projects, this transference of ownership can enable new voices and propel change (both positive and negative) beyond what could be achieved by the originator.

In a lovely and engaging talk by Matthew Sheret he spoke of totems. Totems are a concept recently brilliantly described through the film Inception, where a pocketable object you carry with you reminds you of the real world, reality and your home no matter where you are.

Matthew went on to talk about how you can learn a lot about a person from their pocket possessions. They are intimate, meaningful objects who show off who you are, and this representation should be at the forefront of designers’ minds when creating products.

Despite the increasing importance of the personal, and its expression through possessions, Kelly Goto made a point that really made me think; we don’t really love our technological possessions (such as our phones) as an object, we love the experience they provide. We don’t love out phone if it’s broken, we can just move our experience, along with our data, to another device.

Matthew Sheret also spoke about this when he explained that the problem is that data-holding objects don’t have a huge life span, even though the data within it has the potential to live on. This means that there can be more meaning in the data than in the object, as throwaway consumer products aren’t the heirlooms they once were. They no longer have a chance to age or carry memories themselves.

The value of systems

Don Norman discussed how there’s no longer a distinction between the internet at home/work and the internet in your pocket. You can move from one device to another seamlessly reading the same book or watching the same film. This means that design has become about learning how to create great systems as they create great experiences across all of these devices.

Stephanie and Bryan Rieger explained how controlled environments don’t necessarily encourage growth. Proprietary systems, such as the pod-based coffee machines, use controlled factors which reduce a product’s ability to react to change. If there is a shortage of the materials to make the proprietary product, the whole system must change to accommodate a new material, whereas more flexible systems (such as the traditional French coffee press) are already created to work with different materials. This means that often the simplest and more flexible products are the most likely to succeed, withstanding the tests of time.

The diversity of systems

Craig Mod described how we tend to veer towards a small concentrated area of knowledge and often forget to have perspective. He emphasised the importance of working across disciplines, explaining that the further we travel from our specialist areas of experience, the better an idea we can gain of the frontiers and unknowns of our knowledge.

Don Norman also spoke about how new inter-disciplinary skills are needed to cope with the crossover of products (apps/sites) that our systems cover as the systems themselves are more representative of the brand, and are more enduring, than the products and devices which carry these systems. The ease of a system will resonate beyond a fancy product. As the Riegers pointed out, our most valued systems are designed to live beyond the device.

Don gave the example of this being why Apple are scrapping the standards and creating a new consistency across all their devices, making scrolling on OSX Lion consistent with gestural scrolling on iOS. It’s not about what we already understood as standard on OSX, it’s about establishing a new system that works across multiple products and platforms.

Narratives

The one concept in experience that we don’t think much about is time. Time is what makes the experience of films, books and games successful. Don Norman believes that this is why educational systems will likely move into the gaming sphere, as it’s a way to make learning more immersive.

Dan Hon’s talk was focused around storytelling on the web. Dan gave examples of the easy way and the complicated way to create stories on the web. The example of the complicated way was to create fictional alternate universes/futures with characters who have their own sites and profiles. The easy example was how people create parody accounts on social networks such as Twitter. Both can be a great source of entertainment but rely on the humour of the platform. For instance, Twitter is home to many parody accounts whereas Dan gave an example of how silliness and parodies aren’t welcome on Quora, and can be met with a dismissive lack of humour.

Platforms were key to Dan’s talk about storytelling. He pointed out that we don’t have specialist narrative-creation tools (or even for experiencing the narratives), and the platforms we *do* have aren’t ideal for story telling. There aren’t holodecks for holonovels as idealised in Star Trek, and there’s generally little room for free narrative discoveries. This is partly down to our platforms being so focused around ‘real’ people. Facebook and Google Plus make it near possible to create narratives as you’re only supposed to create accounts in your ‘real’ name.

The difficulty in choosing platforms to create stories is that each platform varies in attention. Youtube has a fairly high chance of discovery as users tend to click from one related video to another, but there is a huge amount of videos to be found within. Other platforms have a very low amount of attention but more niche communities, heightening your chance of discovery.

Kars Alfrink spoke about how game narratives could be used as test beds for societal situations, helping make a difference by creating simulations that encourage players to act responsively towards society. It did seem like a fairly radical approach and response to the UK riots, but Kars pointed out that it wasn’t just about rewarding positive behaviour, as incentivising and promoting rewards instead of rules isn’t the right way to encourage people to take moral responsibility.

Kars spoke about how games, particularly folk games such as chess, can bring together cultures (although they can also create mono cultures) and how he believes that, through fitting games into our daily routines, they could have more value and affect more of our lives.

The speed of technology

Kars Alfrink talked about how technology can amplify the speed and intensity of societal events. Stephanie and Bryan Rieger also spoke about how the rapid speed at which technology is developing, and is adopted, means that time is a luxury and striving for perfection can result in being left behind.

Historically market penetration took a long time, allowing the creators of a product to establish models slowly, make mistakes and correct them, but now time is a luxury and products can become completely established or totally obsolete very quickly. This means there are no longer generations experiencing the same products, and no generation gap, as a few years makes an enormous difference in the products we use and our experiences of them. This has made users much harder to understand and control as well as meaning we must now be constantly creating new mental models for the way we create.

Stephanie and Bryan Rieger explained that with the addition of portable devices, the distribution of ideas has been amplified in a storm of connectedness. Ideas very rapidly converge and create new ideas and events.

Our digital past

Frank Chimero discussed how we’ve actually started to get to the point on the web where we have a history. In our personal digital histories we have huge silos of saved ‘Likes’ and ‘Favourites’. Frank gave the example that these collections that are reminiscent of the old-fashioned common place books, where people would copy their favourite text from other books into their own personal book. He pointed out that this was a type of curation, and that there’s a huge potential in our similar collections. The main value being in the collection as a whole, because of how the data can co-mingle.

The difference between our digital collections and the common place book is that in the digital world we can’t replicate that same architecture of serendipity. Where the common place book allows you to find the content as you browse, digital content allows you to search your content and it is brought to you. We miss this creative, curated style of browsing in our web experience.

Despite there not yet being any ideal web tools, collection and curation is changing the way we publish and consume as everyone can be a publisher and everyone can be a consumer. Don Norman pointed out that the trick now is discovering what is *good* content. And that this can be accomplished through curation.

Frank Chimero discussed how these differences between analogue and digital seem to define our ways to hold on to and remember the past. Digital is invisible, easy-to-forget and is rarely a physical presence but rather a phantom pile that is present but has no set parameters. There appears to be less value in the digital as you can give away copies many times whereas the analogue only has one copy that you can only give away once and thus embodies the associated history, memories and ownership.

Caring for our digital history

Frank spoke about unleashing the potential in our ‘Likes’, ‘Hearts’ and ‘Stars’ collections by curating, rather than just collecting. Using the curation second pass, we can create narratives, arranging our collections in more meaningful ways. Frank explained that there are restrictions in curating through the current tools/services we use to collect. It’s hard to discover patterns and *find* rather than just searching for what we’re looking for, and we limit the arrangement of our collections through blocky, spat-out layouts.

Creating better curated collections would require better digital services. These services would need to change the defaults that we usually arrange our data by, using more personal and natural parameters such as those of LATCH as described by Richard Saul Wurman:

• L – Location
• A – Arrangement
• T – Time
• C – Category
• H – Hierarchy (or continuum, best-worst, first-last)

Using these parameters would be complemented by our adoption of a more contemporary museum arrangement to encourage more exploratory browsing. Frank described how creating more spacious layouts, where a user can enter and exit at any point could help replicate that more serendipitous experience of the common place book.

Understanding the preservation of artefacts and not just data

Matthew Sheret spoke about how data and artefacts can complement each other in creating legacies. Attaching your totem personal possessions to RFID and similar trackers can create triggers for other services that can give you further connections. The example Matthew gave was using your Oyster London Transport card to associate locations with playlists you listen to whilst travelling. This can help you associate memories with places, giving meaning to your travel data, and allowing your totems to reflect your personal life back at you.

Even smart phones could be used as totems, as they go everywhere with you. As Matthew put it, these are the “prettiest sensors in the world.” Smart phones carry so much tracking information to help create more connective data describing your life. The more connections you create increases the value of the data and increases the value of the system.

The inverse can also apply. Matthew was using a hacked Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver toy as a keynote remote. He suggested that hacking physical pocketable objects, such as toys, can create more useful objects that carry extra meaning through the function you have personally given to them. This can scratch the itch of the heirloom and potentially create the legacy personal possession.

In Summary

dConstruct really emphasised for me that technology isn’t the detached work computer in an office for most of us. It is becoming such an integrated part of our lives that we no longer see it as alien objects that are invading our time and distracting us from our loved ones. The products that people are creating are helping us enrich our lives, understand ourselves and our environments better.

This means that when making digital products, exploring the connection between the human and the machine is becoming more important. As we’re trying to improve on adequate, usable experiences, the focus is really shifting from the product and its functions over to the human and their behaviours, and how the technology works as an extension of human life.

It wasn’t a conference so much about ‘takeways’ but I took away a big sense of responsibility for the projects I work on. It’s pretty scary to think about the impact that you can potentially have on someone’s life through what you create, but massively thrilling at the same time!

The Format

The format of the evening was something unfamiliar to most of us. Each guest was interviewed by either Keir or Elliot and then there were questions from the audience. Except it was much less formal than that. There were breaks in between and a comfortably small amount of people (I’m rubbish at estimating amounts of people so I’ll save you the pain) so there was a really relaxed and casual environment where everybody seemed happy to chat about anything.

The genius was really in the way it was run. Keir and Elliot asked really interesting and leading questions and Aral, Sarah and Jeremy were all open and honest so they genuinely did provide insight into their lives in the web/tech industry. I don’t think it would have worked had the interviewers been unfamiliar with the guests, and with Keir and Elliot both working in the industry doing similar jobs to most people in the audience, their questions always felt appropriate and had something of the that’s-just-what-I-wanted-to-ask about them.

The Actual Insights

Education

The first thing that struck me about each of the guests (and a lot of people I spoke to) was that everybody was self-taught in some way. That’s really inspiring for anybody wanting to work with the web or iOS. Each of the guests hadn’t studied design or development formally yet they’re helping lead the way and set the standards in user experience, iOS design and development.

Funnily enough, despite not having formal education, Aral, Sarah and Jeremy each teach workshops. It goes to show how well they know their subject matter in order to host successful workshops, but also how the semi-formalisation of education can work and enough people seem to enjoy learning that way (rather than self-teaching through books or the web.) And a lot of people must prefer this way of learning as the amount of workshops seem to be on the up.

Client Work

One of the directions that a lot of web industry professionals seem to be taking lately is moving away from client work and towards making their own products. Aral was incredibly passionate about how much more he enjoyed working for himself in every sense, rather than having ever-changing clients for bosses.

Sarah provided some great advice on the warning signs when starting work with potential clients, as she’s had her fair share of painful client relationships, and relayed that she thinks she’s just too nice and so clients take advantage. As someone who completely identifies with the niceness approach, it was heartening to see that Sarah has found such great clients that she’s considering working for two exclusively. This is also interesting as it shows more of that same direction of moving away from working with different clients and towards maintaining products as a career.

Jeremy was honest in saying he preferred to just get on with the development, and is very fortunate to work as part of an agency where Andy Budd enjoys handling the clients and accounts sides of a project. I think many freelancers find the sales and admin are the worst part of the job so it made sense that forming an agency with like-minded people would be a good idea, but Jeremy pointed out that this does only really work if there is one individual who is happy to work on the ‘business’ side whilst the others work on the project itself.

Outlooks

What I took away in summary to these talks was really one big point, everybody there was following a career path based around what makes them happy and fulfilled over what might make them rich. And this really emphasises what I love so much about the industry. People are there because they enjoy it, people want to make a difference and make the web a really cool place.

And The Rest

Due to the nature of the Insites tour, people came with a willingness to discuss work, process and dealing with clients rather than focusing on the techniques and technologies that we go on about during the working day. This lead to a few good discussions outside of the talks with the guests where I felt my brain buzzing from finally starting to understand a bit more about how we work.

I am endlessly lucky with the clients I have

I assumed that most people had good clients. From the various discussions it does look like I am very lucky in having ended up with predominantly lovely, responsive, paying-on-time clients. After talking to the Croydon Creatives bunch (and also something Sarah mentioned,) we really seemed to conclude that having a top contract is one of the most important aspects of client work. Not necessarily a boring law-speak contract, but something that appealed to the client and showed that you’re a human who deserves to be paid for your hard work, as well as laying out some just-in-case terms.

Labels and Titles

And the final fascinating conversation that was really ongoing throughout the evening outside of the talks was about labelling. It stemmed from Aral and Andy Budd‘s disagreement on what makes a UX Designer, but lead to discussing how we describe ourselves to clients and each other.

I finally learnt the different between ‘indie‘ and ‘freelance‘ (indie means you produce work for yourself or customers, freelance means you work for clients) and that Jeremy Keith works somewhere between a rotating job title and none whatsoever because it’s the work that do that speaks for you, rather than what you call yourself.

The conclusion that I came to was that labels are a pain. Everybody is judged on what they call themselves and, within the industry, it doesn’t really matter as soon as you’re familiar with somebody’s work. What we do need labels and job titles for is accurately communicating what we do to potential clients. This means we should forget about the acronyms and jargon and sometimes the most appropriate description is ‘I make websites.’

So if you’re in Manchester or Bristol this week, go!

I took a day to write this post, so I’m a bit late in telling people to go to the London leg of the Insites tour, but Manchester is tonight and Bristol is tomorrow night.

It was definitely one of the best events I’ve attended in a while, and one that just gave me faith in how the industry and community is just brilliant (and probably the best ever.)

Note: please forgive my enthusiasm in this post, I hope it’s not *too* annoying, but I had a really good time!

My copy of Responsive Web Design, already featuring a 'much used' cover curl...

Responsive web design is a term summarising design that has a flexibility allowing it to be optimised for different browsing experiences. This might be low levels of detail for mobile devices, big readable layouts for massive projector screens or dumbed-down CSS for old-fashioned browsers. I’m so sure that Responsive Web Design will be our bible for flexible web design for years to come.

The reason why I say ‘for years to come‘ is that Responsive Web Design doesn’t just furnish you with markup examples but actual reasons to do it. Much like its predecessor, HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith, Ethan Marcotte walks you through how to think responsively, integrating flexibility into the design and development processes, and what might trip you up on the way.

The book is split into five easily-digested chapters:

1. Our Responsive Web
2. The Flexible Grid
3. Flexible Images
4. Media Queries
5. Becoming Responsive

These make for great reading if you can only fit one in at a time, but I reckon you could get the whole book read in front of a computer, trying examples as you go, in an afternoon.

I can tell you how useful this book is from how it’s helped me on a recent site design. I have always struggled with creating fluid CSS layouts using percentages. The maths has always boggled my mind and I tend to give it a go then give up when everything falls to bits as soon as I resize my browser window. The thorough explanation of using the magical formula, target ÷ context = result, had me working out percentage-based margins and paddings with very little effort. Now my designs can be more than just ‘mobile version’ and ‘desktop version’!

Part of what makes this book so valuable is the Bot Blog example site walkthrough. Being able to see how you can apply an original fixed-width design to a fluid-width site really helped me understand the restraints and opportunities created by working responsively. The breakdown of media queries is incredibly handy, especially as they’re explained first from the position of starting with an average-width screen design, adapting down to small screens and up to larger screens using max-width rules, and then from the position of ‘mobile first,’ adding styles for gradually larger screens using min-width rules.

My favourite part of the book was where ‘Mobile First’ was introduced. This is the concept of developing first for a mobile browsing experience, then building upon that experience for bigger, more-advanced browsers. It’s pretty much a mobile-focused version of the progressive enhancement approach. It’s a great alternative to starting big and adjusting your CSS for small browsers as it means you’re not delivering huge long stylesheet files to phones that may have a slow or limited connection. Quite a few developers on the more mobile-side of the web industry have been talking about ‘mobile first’ for years,  but it’s great to see it really pulled into mainstream consideration.

Ethan Marcotte writes in a style that is casual but smart and funny in sweet, geeky way. His writing makes you feel like you’re learning from the easy-going class assistant rather than the boring teacher. It’s definitely made me opt to buy the two titles in between HTML5 For Web Designers and Responsive Web Design, CSS3 For Web Designers and The Elements Of Content Strategy, as both books I’ve read so far are so informative and inspiring. There’s also Designing for Emotion and Mobile First to look forward to in the autumn!

And of course in the spirit of the web and all things good, I may as well share this digest so anyone who wasn’t there might get a taste of the event (albeit through my probably-twisted interpretation and slightly dodgy writing!)

Using typography

Typography is about context, context is about content

The web ‘industry’ is starting to focus more on content strategy, and that the whole reason our sites are there is generally to showcase content, and this was reflected in the importance of content being continually brought up throughout the day.

Vincent Connare was the first speaker of the conference. As the creator of Comic Sans, Vincent was the perfect person to explain the significance of fonts being created for a purpose, for a specific context.

Comic Sans was created for Microsoft Home software, when computers were starting to become used in the home. Its fun, casual, comic-book style was based on comics like Watchmen and Batman Returns and was successfully used in speech bubbles and children’s software. It’s the prolific abuse of Comic Sans in inappropriate signage, documents, and many other places that has made it so well-known and unpopular (or inappropriately popular!) As Jason Santa Maria said when talking about choosing an appropriate typeface:

No type is born evil, it’s the context that dictates if it works.

Comic Sans on an Antiques shop sign (credit xxv, Flickr)

Jon Tan and Jonathan Hoefler both spoke about Bell Centennial, a font designed by Matthew Carter for phone books. The considerations in creating this font included environmental awareness, such as how the font is used and where it’s used. Matthew Carter made Bell Centennial easy to skim-read at 6pt and used ink traps for where the ink was likely to bleed on the texture of the phone book paper making the small text even harder to read.

a sample of Bell Centennial

Content first

Tim Brown and Jason Santa Maria both spoke about how the context of the content gives them meaning when choosing a suitable font and how vital it is to compose your design with accountability. Some points they focused on for selecting a suitable typeface were:

• The content, its message, its reason for being
• The audience, who will read it? and how? for how long?
• The culture, the historical and cultural significance of the content, whether it will be read in other languages
• The context of the typeface itself, its resumé, what it signifies to others, how its production affects its appearance

Content-out

Mark Boulton got us designers thinking around content in a new way which is less concentrated on the limitations of our canvas (the size of the browser, the device) and discussed possible solutions for designing from the content-outwards. Mark suggested that as designers became fixated on web standards, we started to take the separation of content and style too literally which meant we created meaningless designs separated from our content. The content-out route really involves knowing the content first, which prompted a brilliant quote from Mark:

If you don’t know your content or audience, go to the pub.

Admitting he didn’t yet know any solid solutions, but wanted to encourage discourse, Mark suggested processes such as working on the details first then assembling a modular design from the details. This process is one that complements the responsive web design approach which almost every speaker hailed as a new way of working on the web.

Responsive design

Jon Tan explained how typography is one of the elements we can keep consistent across responsive design that reconfigures itself to suit different scenarios. No matter what the layout, screen size or device, the typography (along with colour) can instantly identify a design.

Tim Brown explained his process for building responsive design systems around type. The web, with its inherent flexibility, resists the rigid traditional print frameworks using ratios and fixed grids that previously gave designers a structure to work within. Tim suggests creating a modular scale, with the layout and every other element following the type, allowing it to work consistently regardless of device. This is based on the principle that we need a constant to work from in our designs, and type is a perfect constant to use. This is a way of thinking that designers can easily practise and exercise without affecting any of our current processes.

Tim went on to describe how using a modular scale, rather than arbitrary numbers, we can create a design system that is visibly cleaner and more harmonious. He suggested choosing sizes and spaces, such as type, borders, margins, padding, based on a pattern or scale. A couple of examples of ratios that Tim provided were:

• golden ration 1 : 1.618
• musical fifth 1 : 1.5

A golden ratio modular scale created using Tim's website modularscale.com

Different ratios traditionally have meaning or significance to different types of people, so these contexts can even be used to choose an appropriate scale. This also gives designers a reason and justification to backup our design decisions.

Typography is more than text

Jason Santa Maria talked about how typography has a dual life. It’s about both the aesthetic and the readability. As designers we can often get caught up in how the text looks as a whole, but in reality users see the whole as texture and they skim across it. Users are more likely to stop and fixate on a small area for a moment, and this is where they will notice the typography and if it makes the text difficult to read. Jason emphasised the well-known idea that good typography is invisible, it’s about not making the user think or struggle to read.

Jason also made the point that readability isn’t always can I read it? but also do I want to read it? It’s in these scenarios that good typography can help create emotional experiences.

Typography can create emotional experiences

Jon Tan really expanded on his New Adventures in Web Design talk about the lizard brain by emphasising how typography can influence the subconscious. A typeface can convey emotion beyond the words in the text. Jon Tan quoted Paul Rand saying:

A logo derives meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes [...] what it represents is more important than what it looks like.

This is controlled by a part of our brain called the amygdala which can evoke emotional responses without verbal or linguistic input. Jon explained how this means as designers, we need to understand how the brain works, how we need to understand how design makes us feel.

Vincent Connare made an interesting point when speaking about the design of Tahoma as a replacement for MS Sans. Tahoma was designed by Matthew Carter who is a real type designer and he created a technically superior font compared to MS Sans which was created by an engineer. Still, many users complained that they preferred MS Sans. As people get an emotional attachment and loyalty to that which they know, MS Sans was generally considered the ‘better’ font even though it was technically inferior.

MS Sans (left) and Tahoma (right) samples

Typography is hard

As someone who often feels that typography can be overwhelming, and that it’s very difficult to know when you’re making the right decisions, it was great to hear Jason Santa Maria say that typography is hard. Jason went on to explain that a designer doesn’t need to know absolutely everything about typography to use it well, you just need to know how to estimate a font.

Guidelines for choosing and using type

Jason went into great depth on how to choose typefaces. He explained that there are no rules in typography, its imperfect precision where you can only be guided by basic principles and understanding the constraints. Some of the top tips that Jason gave were:

• Choose workhorse typefaces. We shouldn’t feel obliged to choose a new typeface for every project. Create a personal palette of typeface families that work well in display as well as body text. Use different styles from the same family to save having to find multiple typefaces that work well together.
• Avoid overly themed typefaces. These ready-mades show a lack of imagination. Subtle fonts can promote different emotions more effectively.
• Make a list of attributes and feelings that you want to convey, then find typefaces that convey that feeling. This also works for looking for typefaces that are similar, but not the same, to a standard that you use (perhaps such as Helvetica or Georgia.)
• Test your fonts in context and in the right space. Choose your font appropriately to the line height, line length and size required.

Web Fonts

The Benefits of Web Fonts

Everyone at Ampersand was evangelising web fonts. It’s impossible to not do so with all the exciting possibilities playing with lovely new fonts can bring.

Jon Tan described it as a time of renaissance considering we were previously forced to use such a minimal font palette, and we’re now being given a chance to prove our skills in design using these new tools. We can now choose type that’s perfect for purpose.

Jason Santa Maria echoed what I think everybody else was feeling in that it’s a good time to be a designer. Jason shot down the cynical idea that pople are misusing or abusing fonts and emphasised the benefits that we’re gaining in accessibility through no longer having to provide non-standard fonts through dodgy font replacement techniques.

Jon and Jason both spoke about how type can define a brand and how web fonts are helping unify the identity of brands across print and the web, helping convey a voice, facilitate an emotion, and create a relationship between the user and the design.

The Downside of Web Fonts

Along with the eagerness to try new web fonts, there was a lot of talk of the downside of web fonts, but with a positive outlook on how the awkward issues can be solved.

Looking back at font engineering

Metal typesetting, bitmap font creation and OS-safe fonts

David Berlow harked back to working in font engineering when fonts were first needed to look consistent from computer software to printer, explaining how this relates to the web fonts emerging today. One of David’s main considerations is how poor fonts can look at very small sizes. Bearing his experience with metal case type and bitmap fonts in mind, David focuses on how to make web fonts easier to read including basing them on specific size grids, using large x-heights with generally large amounts of whitespace and simplifying fiddly and complicated details.

Rendering

Rendering is a big issue, mentioned by most of the speakers. Jonathan Hoefler spoke about how the type designers at Hoefler and Frere-Jones are creating insane amounts of newly hinted glyphs in order to make their web fonts work as well as they possibly can across the web. Many web fonts are just bad translations of fonts created for print and consequently barely work on the web. A few speakers discussed the difficulties in the differences in fonts across Windows and OSX, with some users preferring Windows’ ‘crispness‘ and others preferring Apple’s ‘soft detail‘.

Museo Slab as seen in Safari on OSX and Internet Explorer on Windows (samples from Typekit)

Tim Brown emphasised how important it is to check your web font choices live, and repeating these checks across the different environments that will use those fonts.

John Daggett described the issues created by web browsers choosing their own fallbacks, such as creating awful synthesised bold fonts through smearing or drawing the letters twice, or obliqueing fonts to give them an italic appearance. Jonathan Hoefler expressed how the lack of being able to distinguish unusual font styles can be an issue, especially for those that have a back slant or are number-only fonts.

CSS Working Draft for Fonts

John Daggett’s talk was an intense look at the potential future of web fonts being controlled through CSS. It was at this point that I felt particularly hopeful. There’s something amazing about how quickly the web seems to have gone from a miserable collection of ‘web-safe’ fonts to being able to see how we can potentially use alternate glyphs and handle kerning.

I don’t think my notes cover all the fantastic features that John described, so for those I recommend you see the CSS Working Draft for Fonts, but here are some of the exciting tidbits I fancy:

• Using opentype font features through ‘font-variant:’. This means having loads of different font features such as multiple glyphs per character in an easy-to-use package giving us fine-grain control all through CSS. At the moment font-variant is used predominantly to select small-caps (with limited success.) The potential in font-variant means we could eventually select font features such as petite caps and automatic fractions, have more control over fallbacks, kerning, ligatures, language support and numerals, as well as supplementing other CSS properties such as text-transform.
• Security for web fonts. Rather than DRM, the idea is to restrict the origin of the font through http headers and the like, requiring a particular protocol, site or port. This could prevent other sites hot-linking your fonts or sniffing your font URLs.

A day listening to clever people talk about fonts

I think that me bothering to write a massive blog post about the themes of Ampersand conference really shows what an amazing day it was. I felt completely inspired, enthused and almost exhausted by the ideas and feelings being expressed by the speakers. I hope this rather disjointed digest might have helped bring some of this excitement to you lot who couldn’t be there on the day!

Recommended Reading and Plugins

Recommended Reading

• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte (via everybody)
• Codex magazine (via Jon Tan)

Recommended Sites

• Fontsmith (via Jon Tan)
• Google ‘font font focus’ for Font Font Focus sites (via Tim Brown)
• Hoefler & Frere-Jones at Typography.com (via Tim Brown)
• Paul Shaw Letter Design (via Tim Brown)
• Fonts in Use (via Tim Brown)
• Web Font Specimen (via Tim Brown)
• Modular Scale (via Tim Brown)
• Using Typekit font events for responsive and fallback design (via Tim Brown)

Recommended Plugins

• Lettering.js (via Jason Santa Maria)
• Fit Text (via Jason Santa Maria)