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Track (1) Support Policies are not Design Promises
We all get that âmobileâ is a paradigm shift. Weâre experiencing it for ourselves. We feel it especially acutely when our phoneâs battery dies and weâre stranded someplace without a charger and suddenly have to go cold-turkey for a while and shamefully acknowledge the junkie twitch of our own fingers toward that dead brick in our pockets. But that puts us in the mobile milk bottle doesnât it? Inside, looking out, unable to see the label and know what sort of milk this really is. So, sometimes, we have to adopt crazy, dogmatic policies to get ourselves some perspective.
It started with âmobile first,â which sounds nice but is actually rash and silly and unfit to handle the scope of the very projects that need special attention paid to the mobile experience. Itâs evolved and expanded with responsive design, atomic design, etc. Helpful stuff. And, some organizations are even blocking staff from viewing the âdesktopâ version of their websites (I say âsomeâ because now that the NYT has done it, monkey see monkey do). As nutty as that may sound, itâs at least informed by the data NYT have collected that illuminate their readersâ context: that over half of NYT traffic is from mobile devices.
Data > Dogma. Which is why we need be more mindful of articulating detailed, data-informed design approaches customized to their context, not vast, sweeping, generalities that barely address the common problems, to say little of the unique, specific ones you face in your project. Step 1 should always be to review the clientâs device profile and, consider it within the larger context of the âmarketâsâ device profile. With those data, Step 2 is to outline a breakpoint strategy that best fits the situation, bearing in mind that this means prioritizing certain platforms, devices, and screen resolutions, not promising â whether intentionally or not â that responsive design will make the thing look good in every possible âmobileâ situation. Step 3 is to take that plan and re-articulate it as a support policy for the property youâre working on. That way, youâll have a source of truth when someone complains months later that the site doesnât look right on the CMOâs nephewâs Droid or the CEOâs new smartwatch. Perhaps then you amend your support policy, but you do that as part of documenting the new work youâre doing to address these new concerns, not after youâve treated it like a bug fix.
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Track (2) A Timeline in Films
I recently re-watched High Fidelity. Have you seen that movie? I recall liking it very much, and on re-watch, still like it. But Iâm not gushing. Something about the end just doesnât work for me. It seems rushed and superficial in a way that the rest of the film just doesnât. But that being said, I think that High Fidelity has a certain perfection to its portrayal of its time.
High Fidelity was released in 2000, so Iâd say itâs safe to call itâs portrayal one of the turn of the millenium; not of 2000, per se, but of the end of the 1990s. I recall feeling that way when it was first released. That it was quintessentially of its time. And it still seems that way. And that got me thinking about other movies that perfectly capture the time at which they were made. Thatâs a very particular kind of film, isnât it? It excludes all fantasy, science-fiction, period pieces, and the like. But Iâd love to make a timeline, perhaps by decade, expressed in films. Not of films â as in, line, dates, films of note from those dates â but in films. Just the films, representing time. Imagine that: a film for the twenties; a film for the thirties; on and on up until the now. What films would you put on that list? What films do you think perfectly capture the time at which they were made?
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Track (3) Nobody is Planning for You
If there is one thing I read this week that I agreed with the most â even though itâs on a list of other ârulesâ and conclusions that I donât really endorse â itâs this:
âIf you donât design your own life plan, chances are youâll fall into someone elseâs plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.â
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Track (4) NEW NEW NEW NEW NEW
Iâm not saying itâs a sign of the apocalypse, but that we live at a time that is increasingly, irrationally prone to overvalue the fast and the new is not good.
A case in point: Itâs more controversial today to say that perhaps a company long known for making great computers but also for inventing some gamechanging new things should continue to make great computers than it is to go out on a limb and crystal-ball up their next gamechanger. Am I being too vague? What Iâm saying is that Apple has made wonderful computers for decades and it would be a damn shame if they stopped making wonderful computers because the market (and really, what I mean by that is greedy shareholders) pressured them â the richest company on the planet! â to repeat their redefine-the-category performance by making a car. Because letâs be honest; the iCar would not be the next iPhone. Theyâd do what they did with the watch and start talking about leather and chrome and such, and as far as the technology is concerned, it would be nothing more than a Tesla competitor. Hasnât anyone at Apple watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi?
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Track (5) This is a Long, Indulgent Track Which Will Probably Alienate the Listener.
As Iâm sure you already know, Mary Meeker presented her Internet Trends 2015 deck at the Code Conference a few weeks ago. Iâve been meaning to take a look at it but didnât get time until this week. Normally, Iâm all about this yearly check-in with the oracle. But this time, I dunno guys. Iâve got some comments. And rather than my usual thinkpiece bombast, I give you the notes I wrote as I watched the talk, as I wrote them. No editing, no funny business. Consider it a liveblog of the re-run.
01:15: OK, so she reads her slides. She can do this because sheâs Mary Meeker. But you? No. Do not do this.
01:42: âWhatâs happened since 1995?â Huh. What tech trend isnât going to look tweetably dramatic when plotted over twenty years?! But seriously, I really donât think that many people have their collective technology heads still stuck back in 1995. Which, incidentally, was still a time of VHS tapes and AOL discs and what not.
02:03: Straight-up LOLing at the âUser Control of Content Up Significantlyâ pronouncement. I liked it last time I decked it when the headline was, âSocietal Pattern of Food, Shelter, and Relationships Emerging.â As in, really. A MASSIVE spike around 2008ish but the friggin timeline starts in 1965 and doesnât have itâs first dot on it until after 1975 and itâs labeled âVCR.â Kind of cooking the books if you ask me.
02:07: Still LOLing. Oracle is now reading the âImpact of Internet Has Been Extraordinary & Broadâ slide, which has things like âconsumer,â âbusiness,â and âeducation,â in one column, with a little tiny pie chart next to it showing âInternet Impact to Date.â So, âConsumerâ is just one big filled in pie. Business is about 2/3 a pie. No numbers. WHAT ON EARTH DOES THAT MEAN? Nothing. It means nothing. Oh, she said, âWe sort of analyzedâŠâ That explains everything.
This is just the first two-and-a-half minutes.
She is still just reading her slides. This could have been a webinar. No. She could have sent a telepresence robot.
04:50: Ok, you think âmaking a point in five seconds is a beautiful thing,â to which Iâm like, what sorts of points can you make in five seconds and does it count if I string twenty of those together and take a gratuitous entire minute of your time? But then, wait. Wait. You are saying you are excited about Facebook carousel ADS? CAROUSEL_ADS? So, every mobile guru on the planet says nobody can be bothered to click/tap/swipe through a carousel when itâs full of free, helpful content on some marketing site, but weâre going to take seriously the idea that they will when itâs full of ADS. Terrific. Brilliant. Of course, here I am sitting through something thatâs basically a carousel, isnât it?
05:27: So weâre calling watching video on phones âvertical viewingâ now. Just in case you werenât up on the incredibly annoying jargon that you must use now in order to sound informed.
05:36: Mary Meeker, isnât it at least possible that full-screen, âverticalâ ads on Snapchat are getting a 9x higher âcompletion rateâ (Jargon Alert: thatâs what weâre calling clicks now?) because theyâre designed to make it easier to accidentally tap the adâs link rather than get rid of the ad? No, she says, âThis is certainly something that consumers appear to be liking and that advertisers should be excited about.â Sure to the second part. As for the first part, youâve got to be fucking kidding me. Apologies for the language but NEWS FLASH: No consumer likes pre-roll ads of any kind.
06:36 - 07:30: âHereâs are a bunch of businesses that exist now. But theyâre apps so thatâs why theyâre new and important.â (Paraphrase)
07:45 - 09:42: Messaging is the most important thing we do on the internet. I had no idea. âWatch this space.â Thanks for the tip!
09:46 - 11:12: Finally, something worth talking about. This user-generated content stuff is starting to pique my interest. Mostly because the platforms seeing the largest growth of content creation and consumption are ones I spend little to no time on: Snapchat (37mm views of a new yearâs 2014 eve story); Twitch (this year, 83% more content; 33% more time spent watching; 122% more active users); Soundcloud (this year 33% more content; 200% more creators); Wattpad (this year, 140% more content; 48% more users). Iâm actually interested in generational tech blind spots, and Iâm OK with admitting Iâve probably got a few of those. Thatâs an opportunity for research and discovery. I find it interesting that Meeker doesnât get into that â to be fair, she probably doesnât have time â especially given the demographics of her audience.
11:25: âMillenials love their smartphones,â and are taking a shitload of pictures with them and uploading them all to social media. So yeah, Huxleyâs world, not Orwellâs. Sure, it gives us neat things like what Microsoftâs and Googleâs research teams have done with recreating important places on the globe by aggregating user photos, but it also gives us surveillance by proxy, which sounds more benign and empowering when we call it sousveillance. Meeker discussed none of this. Ainât nobody got time fo âdat, sadly.
12:36: âThe average individual needs shelter every day.â Another massive LOL from me. See 02:03 and file under âBasic Human Truths Needing No Explanation on Slides.â
12:55: âDronesâŠsomething is going on here.â Yes, spying and murders. Oh, but youâre talking about something else. My bad.
That was just the first half. And yeah, I guess I got a little snarky. Can you blame me? Itâs late and I just lost a bunch of work to a tablet glitch, autosave, the cloud and an app I used to love until I discovered it has no versioning. And anyway, tear down your idols, people! In the second half, she reviews data pulled together to look specifically at the relationship between technology and the workplace. You can watch that or review the deck for yourself.
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Track (6) You Should Write It Down Even Though Itâs Probably Already Been Written
Here are five good reasons
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One last thing: Friend and fellow Tinyletterer Ian Fitzpatrick, Chief Strategy Officer at Almighty, has put together a pretty interesting survey on accountability in customer service. With it, he and the Almighty team are looking to gather some data that will help paint a better picture of where that accountability lies and how itâs defined, used, and measured. Heâs right that thereâs really little in the way of study on that subject. So if you or anyone else you know is working within a large, enterprise organization, please take a moment to take the survey and/or share it. Itâs completely anonymous, and Ian and his team have documented their promise to stick to the facts. No one will ever be contacted, nor will their organizations be directly referenced. Heâs also offering to share the data they gather after the survey is closed. Hereâs the survey: Customer Experience and the Organization
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Heavy Rotation: PRI and Wisconsin Public Radioâs To the Best of Our Knowledge did an episode this week on Invisible Workers that was illuminating and depressing, especially in the segments covering Amazon warehouse workers, migrant workers, and unpaid interns. If youâve ever bought something online or like fresh fruit, you should probably allow this information into your brain.
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Recent Tabs: The first picture ever taken from space was taken in 1945 from a Nazi rocket. What would happen if all our satellites were suddenly destroyed. Meet Processing. Computers with âcommon senseâ⊠as if there is such a thing. A bridge in Amsterdam will be 3-D printed by robots as they cross the canal it will span. Gravit is a pretty darn impressive browser-based vector editor and layered creative tool. Theyâre just getting started, and promise to always be free â not sure how that will work â but things like this could put some serious pressure on Adobe. âBecause his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.â The Secret Law of Page Harmony is a page I refer back to quite a bit. Nine years later, episode two of the In Our Own Time podcast is out. âAnthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.â Why the trip back always feels shorter. âI started out so optimistic and I believed the internet was going to change the world. Now Iâm cowering in the corner hoping itâll all go away.â How to shut up. ALL SIX STAR WARS FILMS AT ONCE. If youâre into that sort of chaos, then hereâs a chaser.