rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 39,Meet for Learning,"“I’ve never worked in a place like this,” said one of my direct reports during our daily stand-up meeting. And with that statement, my mind raced to the most important thing about lawyering that I’ve learned from decades of watching lawyers lawyer on TV: don’t ask a question you don’t know the answer to. But I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to learn more. The thought developed in my mind. The words formed in my mouth. And the vocalization occurred: “A place like this?” “I’ve never worked where people are so honest and transparent about things.” Designing a learning-centered culture Before we started Center Centre, Jared Spool and I discussed both the larger goals and the smaller details of this new UX design school. We talked about things like user experience, curriculum, and structure. We discussed the pattern we saw in our research. Hiring managers told us time and again that great designers have excellent technical and interpersonal skills. But, more importantly, the best designers are lifelong learners—they are willing and able to learn how to do new things. Learning this led us to ask a critical question: how would we intentionally design a learning-centered experience? To craft the experience we were aiming for, we knew we had to create a learning-centered culture for our students and our employees. We knew that our staff would need to model the behaviors our students needed to learn. We knew the best way to shape the culture was to work with our direct reports—our directs—to develop the behaviors we wanted them to exemplify. To craft the experience we were aiming for, we knew we had to create a learning-centered culture for our students and our employees. We knew that our staff would need to model the behaviors our students needed to learn. Building a learning team Our learning-centered culture starts with our staff. We believe in transparency. Transparency builds trust. Effective organizations have effective teams who trust each other as individuals. One huge way we build that trust and provide opportunities for transparency is in our meetings. (I know, I know—meetings! Yuck!) But seriously, running and participating in effective meetings is a great opportunity to build a learning-centered culture. Meetings—when done well—allow individuals time to come together, to share, and to listen. These behaviors, executed on a consistent and regular basis, build honest and trusting relationships. An effective meeting is one that achieves the desired outcomes of that meeting. While different meetings aim for different results, at Center Centre all meetings have a secondary goal: meet for learning. A framework for learning-centered meetings We’ve developed a framework for our meetings. We use it for all our meetings, which means attendees know what to expect. It also saves us from reinventing the wheel in each meeting. These basic steps help our meetings focus on the valuable face-to-face interaction we’re having, and help us truly begin to learn from one another. An agenda for a staff meeting. Use effective meeting basics Prepare for the meeting before the meeting. If you’re running the meeting, prepare a typed agenda and share it before the meeting. Agendas have start times for each item. Start the meeting on time. Don’t wait for stragglers. Define ground rules. Get input from attendees. Recurring meetings don’t have to do this every time. Keep to the meeting agenda. Put off-topic questions and ideas in a parking lot, a visual document that everyone can see, so you can address the questions and ideas later. Finish on time. And if you’ve reached the meeting’s goals, finish early. Parking lots where ideas on sticky notes can be posted for later consideration. Focus to learn Have tech-free meetings: no laptops, no phones, no things with notifications. Bring a notebook and a pen. Take notes by hand. You’re not taking minutes, you’re writing to learn. Come with a learning mindset Ask: what are our goals for this meeting? (Hopefully answered by the meeting agenda.) Ask: what can I learn overall? Ask: what can I learn from each of my colleagues? Ask: what can I share that will help the team learn overall? Ask: what can I share that will help each of my colleagues learn? Investing in regularly scheduled learning-centered meetings At Center Centre, we have two types of recurring all-staff meetings: daily stand-ups and weekly staff meetings. (We are a small organization, so it makes sense to meet as an entire group.) Yes, that means we spend thirty minutes each day in stand-up, for a total of two and a half hours of stand-up meeting time each week. And, yes, we also have a weekly ninety-minute sit-down staff meeting on top of that. This investment in time is an investment in learning. We use these meetings to build our transparency, and, therefore, our trust. The regularity of these meetings helps us maintain ongoing, open sharing about our responsibilities, our successes, and our learning. For instance, we answer five questions in our stand-up: What did I get done since the last stand-up (I reported at)? What is my goal to accomplish before the next stand-up? What’s preventing me from getting these things done, if anything? What’s the highest risk or most unknown thing right now about what I’m trying to get done? What is the most important thing I learned since the last time we met and how will what I learned change the way I approach things in the future? Each person writes out their answers to these questions before the meeting. Each person brings their answers printed on paper to the meeting. And each person brings a pen to jot down notes. Notes compiled for a stand-up meeting. During the stand-up, each person shares their answers to the five questions. To sustain a learning-centered culture, the fifth question is the most important question to answer. It allows individual reflection focused on learning. Sometimes this isn’t an easy question to answer. It makes us stretch. It makes us think. By sharing our individual answers to the fifth question, we open ourselves up to the group. When we honestly share what we’ve learned, we openly admit that we didn’t know something. Sharing like this would be scary (and even risky) if we didn’t have a learning-centered culture. We often share the actual process of how we learned something. By listening, each of us is invited to learn more about the topic at hand, consider what more there is to learn about that topic, and even gain insights into other methods of learning—which can be applied to other topics. Sharing the answers to the fifth question also allows opportunities for further conversations. We often take what someone has individually learned and find ways to apply it for our entire team in support of our organization. We are, after all, learning together. Building individual learners We strive to grow together as a team at Center Centre, but we don’t lose sight of the importance of the individuals who form our team. As individuals, we bring our goals, dreams, abilities, and prior knowledge to the team. To build learning teams, we must build individual learners. A team made up of lifelong learners, who share their learning and learn from each other, is a team that will continually produce better results. As a manager, I need to meet each direct where they are with their current abilities and knowledge. Then, I can help them take their skills and knowledge base to the next levels. This process requires each individual direct to engage in professional development. We believe effective managers help their directs engage in behaviors that support growth and development. Effective managers encourage and support learning. Our weekly one-on-ones One way we encourage learning is through weekly one-on-ones. Each of my directs meets with me, individually, for thirty minutes each week. The meeting is their meeting. It is not my meeting. My direct sets the agenda. They talk about what they want to talk about. They can talk about work. They can talk about things outside of work. They can talk about their health, their kids, and even their cat. Whatever is important to them is important to me. I listen. I take notes. Although the direct sets the specific agenda, the meeting has three main parts. Approximately ten minutes for them (the direct), ten minutes for me (the manager), and ten minutes for us to talk about their future within—and beyond—our organization. Coaching for future performance The final third of our one-on-one is when I coach my directs. Coaching looks to the direct’s future performance. It focuses on developing the direct’s skills. Coaching isn’t hard. It doesn’t take much time. For me, it usually takes less than five minutes a week during a one-on-one. The first time I coach one of my directs, I ask them to brainstorm about the skills they want to improve. They usually already have an idea about this. It’s often something they’ve wanted to work on for some time, but didn’t think they had the time or the knowhow to improve. If a direct doesn’t know what they want to improve, we discuss their job responsibilities—specifically the aspects of the job that concern them. Coaching provides an opportunity for me to ask, “In your job, what are the required skills that you feel like you don’t have (or know well enough, or perform effectively, or use with ease)?” Sometimes I have to remind a direct that it’s okay not to know how to do something (even if it’s a required part of their job). After all, our organization is a learning organization. In a learning organization, no one knows everything but everyone is willing to learn anything. After we review the job responsibilities together, I ask my direct what skill they’d like to work to improve. Whatever they choose, we focus on that skill for coaching—I’ve found my directs work better when they’re internally motivated. Sometimes the first time I talk with a direct about coaching, they get a bit anxious. If this happens, I share a personal story about my professional learning journey. I say something like: I didn’t know how to make a school before we started to make Center Centre. I didn’t know how to manage an entire team of people—day in and day out—until I started managing a team of people every day. When I realized that I was the boss—and that the success of the school would hinge, at least in part, on my skills as a manager—I was a bit terrified. I was missing an important skill set that I needed to know (and I needed to know well). When I first understood this, I felt bad—like I should have already known how to be a great manager. But then I realized, I’d never faced this situation. I’d never needed to know how to use this skill set in this way. I worked through my anxiety about feeling inadequate. I decided I’d better learn how to be an effective manager because the school needed me to be one. You needed me to be one. Every day, I work to improve my management skills. You’ve probably noticed that some days I’m better at it than others. I try not to beat myself up about this, although it’s hard—I’d like to be perfect at it. But I’m not. I know that if I make a conscious, daily effort to learn how to be a better manager, I’ll continue to improve. So that’s what I do. Every day I learn. I learn by doing. I learn how to be better than I was the day before. That’s what I ask of you. Once we determine the skill the direct wants to learn, we figure out how they can go about learning it. I ask: “How could you learn this skill?” We brainstorm for two or three minutes about this. We write down every idea that comes to mind, and we write it so both of us can easily see the options (both whiteboards and sticky notes on the wall work well for this exercise). Read a book. Research online. Watch a virtual seminar. Listen to a podcast. Talk to a mentor. Reach out to an expert. Attend a conference. Shadow someone else while they do the skill. Join a professional organization. The goal is to get the direct on a path of self-development. I’m coaching their development, but I’m not the main way my direct will learn this new skill. I ask my direct which path seems like the best place to start. I let them choose whatever option they want (as long as it works with our budget). They are more likely to follow through if they are in control of this process. Next, we work to break down the selected path into tasks. We only plan one week’s worth of tasks. The tasks are small, and the deadlines are short. My direct reports when each task is completed. At our next one-on-one, I ask my direct about their experience learning this new skill. Rinse. Repeat. That’s it. I spend five minutes a week talking with each direct about their individual learning. They develop their professional skills, and together we’re creating a learning-centered culture. Asking questions I don’t know the answer to When my direct said, “I’ve never worked where people are so honest and transparent about things,” it led me to believe that all this is working. We are building a learning-centered culture. This week I was reminded that creating a learning-centered culture starts not just with the staff, but with me. When I challenge myself to learn and then share what I’m currently learning, my directs want to learn more about what I’m learning about. For example, I decided I needed to improve my writing skills. A few weeks ago, I realized that I was sorely out of practice and I felt like I had lost my voice. So I started to write. I put words on paper. I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I didn’t know how to write anymore (at least not well or effectively). I bought some books on writing (mostly Peter Elbow’s books like Writing with Power, Writing Without Teachers, and Vernacular Eloquence), and I read them. I read them all. Reading these books was part of my personal coaching. I used the same steps to coach myself as I use with my directs when I coach them. In stand-ups, I started sharing what I accomplished (like I completed one of the books) and what I learned by doing—specific things, like engaging in freewriting and an open-ended writing process. This week, I went to lunch with one of my directs. She said, “You’ve been talking about freewriting a lot. You’re really excited about it. Freewriting seems like it’s helping your writing process. Would you tell me more about it?” So I shared the details with her. I shared the reasons why I think freewriting is helping. I’m not focused on perfection. Instead, each day I’m focused on spending ten, uninterrupted minutes writing down whatever comes to my mind. It’s opening my writing mind. It’s allowing my words to flow more freely. And it’s helping me feel less self-conscious about my writing. She said, “Leslie, when you say you’re self-conscious about your writing, I laugh. Not because it’s funny. But because when I read what you write, I think, ‘What is there to improve?’ I think you’re a great writer. It’s interesting to know that you think you can be a better writer. I like learning about your learning process. I think I could do freewriting. I’m going to give it a try.” There’s something magical about all of this. I’m not even sure I can eloquently put it into words. I just know that our working environment is something very different. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. Somehow, by sharing that I don’t know everything and that I’m always working to learn more, I invite my directs to be really open about what they don’t know. And they see it’s possible always to learn and grow. I’m glad I ignore all the lawyering I’ve learned from watching TV. I’m glad I ask the questions I don’t know the answers to. And I’m glad my directs do the same. When we meet for learning, we accelerate and amplify the learning process—building individual learners and learning teams. Embracing the unknown and working toward understanding is what makes our culture a learning-centered culture. Photos by Summer Kohlhorst.",2014,Leslie Jensen-Inman,lesliejenseninman,2014-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/meet-for-learning/,process 30,"Making Sites More Responsive, Responsibly","With digital projects we’re used to shifting our thinking to align with our target audience. We may undertake research, create personas, identify key tasks, or observe usage patterns, with our findings helping to refine our ongoing creations. A product’s overall experience can make or break its success, and when it comes to defining these experiences our development choices play a huge role alongside more traditional user-focused activities. The popularisation of responsive web design is a great example of how we are able to shape the web’s direction through using technology to provide better experiences. If we think back to the move from table-based layouts to CSS, initially our clients often didn’t know or care about the difference in these approaches, but we did. Responsive design was similar in this respect – momentum grew through the web industry choosing to use an approach that we felt would give a better experience, and which was more future-friendly. We tend to think of responsive design as a means of displaying content appropriately across a range of devices, but the technology and our implementation of it can facilitate much more. A responsive layout not only helps your content work when the newest smartphone comes out, but it also ensures your layout suitably adapts if a visually impaired user drastically changes the size of the text. The 24 ways site at 400% on a Retina MacBook Pro displays a layout more typically used for small screens. When we think more broadly, we realise that our technical choices and approaches to implementation can have knock-on effects for the greater good, and beyond our initial target audiences. We can make our experiences more responsive to people’s needs, enhancing their usability and accessibility along the way. Being responsibly responsive Of course, when we think about being more responsive, there’s a fine line between creating useful functionality and becoming intrusive and overly complex. In the excellent Responsible Responsive Design, Scott Jehl states that: A responsible responsive design equally considers the following throughout a project: Usability: The way a website’s user interface is presented to the user, and how that UI responds to browsing conditions and user interactions. Access: The ability for users of all devices, browsers, and assistive technologies to access and understand a site’s features and content. Sustainability: The ability for the technology driving a site or application to work for devices that exist today and to continue to be usable and accessible to users, devices, and browsers in the future. Performance: The speed at which a site’s features and content are perceived to be delivered to the user and the efficiency with which they operate within the user interface. Scott’s book covers these ideas in a lot more detail than I’ll be able to here (put it on your Christmas list if it’s not there already), but for now let’s think a bit more about our roles as digital creators and the power this gives us. Our choices around technology and the decisions we have to make can be extremely wide-ranging. Solutions will vary hugely depending on the needs of each project, though we can further explore the concept of making our creations more responsive through the use of humble web technologies. The power of the web We all know that under the HTML5 umbrella are some great new capabilities, including a number of JavaScript APIs such as geolocation, web audio, the file API and many more. We often use these to enhance the functionality of our sites and apps, to add in new features, or to facilitate device-specific interactions. You’ll have seen articles with flashy titles such as “Top 5 JavaScript APIs You’ve Never Heard Of!”, which you’ll probably read, think “That’s quite cool”, yet never use in any real work. There is great potential for technologies like these to be misused, but there are also great prospects for them to be used well to enhance experiences. Let’s have a look at a few examples you may not have considered. Offline first When we make websites, many of us follow a process which involves user stories – standardised snippets of context explaining who needs what, and why. “As a student I want to pay online for my course so I don’t have to visit the college in person.” “As a retailer I want to generate unique product codes so I can manage my stock.” We very often focus heavily on what needs doing, but may not consider carefully how it will be done. As in Scott’s list, accessibility is extremely important, not only in terms of providing a great experience to users of assistive technologies, but also to make your creation more accessible in the general sense – including under different conditions. Offline first is yet another ‘first’ methodology (my personal favourite being ‘tea first’), which encourages us to develop so that connectivity itself is an enhancement – letting users continue with tasks even when they’re offline. Despite the rapid growth in public Wi-Fi, if we consider data costs and connectivity in developing countries, our travel habits with planes, underground trains and roaming (or simply if you live in the UK’s signal-barren East Anglian wilderness as I do), then you’ll realise that connectivity isn’t as ubiquitous as our internet-addled brains would make us believe. Take a scenario that I’m sure we’re all familiar with – the digital conference. Your venue may be in a city served by high-speed networks, but after overloading capacity with a full house of hashtag-hungry attendees, each carrying several devices, then everyone’s likely to be offline after all. Wouldn’t it be better if we could do something like this instead? Someone visits our conference website. On this initial run, some assets may be cached for future use: the conference schedule, the site’s CSS, photos of the speakers. When the attendee revisits the site on the day, the page shell loads up from the cache. If we have cached content (our session timetable, speaker photos or anything else), we can load it directly from the cache. We might then try to update this, or get some new content from the internet, but the conference attendee already has a base experience to use. If we don’t have something cached already, then we can try grabbing it online. If for any reason our requests for new content fail (we’re offline), then we can display a pre-cached error message from the initial load, perhaps providing our users with alternative suggestions from what is cached. There are a number of ways we can make something like this, including using the application cache (AppCache) if you’re that way inclined. However, you may want to look into service workers instead. There are also some great resources on Offline First! if you’d like to find out more about this. Building in offline functionality isn’t necessarily about starting offline first, and it’s also perfectly possible to retrofit sites and apps to catch offline scenarios, but this kind of graceful degradation can end up being more complex than if we’d considered it from the start. By treating connectivity as an enhancement, we can improve the experience and provide better performance than we can when waiting to counter failures. Our websites can respond to connectivity and usage scenarios, on top of adapting how we present our content. Thinking in this way can enhance each point in Scott’s criteria. As I mentioned, this isn’t necessarily the kind of development choice that our clients will ask us for, but it’s one we may decide is simply the right way to build based on our project, enhancing the experience we provide to people, and making it more responsive to their situation. Even more accessible We’ve looked at accessibility in terms of broadening when we can interact with a website, but what about how? Our user stories and personas are often of limited use. We refer in very general terms to students, retailers, and sometimes just users. What if we have a student whose needs are very different from another student? Can we make our sites even more usable and accessible through our development choices? Again using JavaScript to illustrate this concept, we can do a lot more with the ways people interact with our websites, and with the feedback we provide, than simply accepting keyboard, mouse and touch inputs and displaying output on a screen. Input Ambient light detection is one of those features that looks great in simple demos, but which we struggle to put to practical use. It’s not new – many satnav systems automatically change the contrast for driving at night or in tunnels, and our laptops may alter the screen brightness or keyboard backlighting to better adapt to our surroundings. Using web technologies we can adapt our presentation to be better suited to ambient light levels. If our device has an appropriate light sensor and runs a browser that supports the API, we can grab the ambient light in units using ambient light events, in JavaScript. We may then change our presentation based on different bandings, perhaps like this: window.addEventListener('devicelight', function(e) { var lux = e.value; if (lux < 50) { //Change things for dim light } if (lux >= 50 && lux <= 10000) { //Change things for normal light } if (lux > 10000) { //Change things for bright light } }); Live demo (requires light sensor and supported browser). Soon we may also be able to do such detection through CSS, with light-level being cited in the Media Queries Level 4 specification. If that becomes the case, it’ll probably look something like this: @media (light-level: dim) { /*Change things for dim light*/ } @media (light-level: normal) { /*Change things for normal light*/ } @media (light-level: washed) { /*Change things for bright light*/ } While we may be quick to dismiss this kind of detection as being a gimmick, it’s important to consider that apps such as Light Detector, listed on Apple’s accessibility page, provide important context around exactly this functionality. “If you are blind, Light Detector helps you to be more independent in many daily activities. At home, point your iPhone towards the ceiling to understand where the light fixtures are and whether they are switched on. In a room, move the device along the wall to check if there is a window and where it is. You can find out whether the shades are drawn by moving the device up and down.” everywaretechnologies.com/apps/lightdetector Input can be about so much more than what we enter through keyboards. Both an ever increasing amount of available sensors and more APIs being supported by the major browsers will allow us to cater for more scenarios and respond to them accordingly. This can be as complex or simple as you need; for instance, while x-webkit-speech has been deprecated, the web speech API is available for a number of browsers, and research into sign language detection is also being performed by organisations such as Microsoft. Output Web technologies give us some great enhancements around input, allowing us to adapt our experiences accordingly. They also provide us with some nice ways to provide feedback to users. When we play video games, many of our modern consoles come with the ability to have rumble effects on our controller pads. These are a great example of an enhancement, as they provide a level of feedback that is entirely optional, but which can give a great deal of extra information to the player in the right circumstances, and broaden the scope of our comprehension beyond what we’re seeing and hearing. Haptic feedback is possible on the web as well. We could use this in any number of responsible applications, such as alerting a user to changes or using different patterns as a communication mechanism. If you find yourself in a pickle, here’s how to print out SOS in Morse code through the vibration API. The following code indicates the length of vibration in milliseconds, interspersed by pauses in milliseconds. navigator.vibrate([100, 300, 100, 300, 100, 300, 600, 300, 600, 300, 600, 300, 100, 300, 100, 300, 100]); Live demo (requires supported browser) With great power… What you’ve no doubt come to realise by now is that these are just more examples of progressive enhancement, whose inclusion will provide a better experience if the capabilities are available, but which we should not rely on. This idea isn’t new, but the most important thing to remember, and what I would like you to take away from this article, is that it is up to us to decide to include these kind of approaches within our projects – if we don’t root for them, they probably won’t happen. This is where our professional responsibility comes in. We won’t necessarily be asked to implement solutions for the scenarios above, but they illustrate how we can help to push the boundaries of experiences. Maybe we’ll have to switch our thinking about how we build, but we can create more usable products for a diverse range of people and usage scenarios through the choices we make around technology. Let’s stop thinking simply in terms of features inside a narrow view of our target users, and work out how we can extend these to cater for a wider set of situations. When you plan your next digital project, consider the power of the web and the enhancements we can use, and try to make your projects even more responsive and responsible.",2014,Sally Jenkinson,sallyjenkinson,2014-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/making-sites-more-responsive-responsibly/,code 32,Cohesive UX,"With Yosemite, Apple users can answer iPhone calls on their MacBooks. This is weird. And yet it’s representative of a greater trend toward cohesion. Shortly after upgrading to Yosemite, a call came in on my iPhone and my MacBook “rang” in parallel. And I was all, like, “Wut?” This was a new feature in Yosemite, and honestly it was a little bizarre at first. Apple promotional image showing a phone call ringing simultaneously on multiple devices. However, I had just spoken at a conference on the very topic you’re reading about now, and therefore I appreciated the underlying concept: the cohesion of user experience, the cohesion of screens. This is just one of many examples I’ve encountered since beginning to speak about this topic months ago. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look back at the past few years, specifically the role of responsive web design. RWD != cohesive experience I needn’t expound on the virtues of responsive web design (RWD). You’ve likely already encountered more than a career’s worth on the topic. This is a good thing. Count me in as one of its biggest fans. However, if we are to sing the praises of RWD, we must also acknowledge its shortcomings. One of these is that RWD ends where the browser ends. For all its goodness, RWD really has no bearing on native apps or any other experiences that take place outside the browser. This makes it challenging, therefore, to create cohesion for multi-screen users if RWD is the only response to “let’s make it work everywhere.” We need something that incorporates the spirit of RWD while unifying all touchpoints for the entire user experience—single device or several devices, in browser or sans browser, native app or otherwise. I call this cohesive UX, and I believe it’s the next era of successful user experiences. Toward a unified whole Simply put, the goal of cohesive UX is to deliver a consistent, unified user experience regardless of where the experience begins, continues, and ends. Two facets are vital to cohesive UX: Function and form Data symmetry Let’s examine each of these. Function AND form Function over form, of course. Right? Not so fast, kiddo. Consider Bruce Lawson’s dad. After receiving an Android phone for Christmas and thumbing through his favorite sites, he was puzzled why some looked different from their counterparts on the desktop. “When a site looked radically different,” Bruce observed, “he’d check the URL bar to ensure that he’d typed in the right address. In short, he found RWD to be confusing and it meant he didn’t trust the site.” A lack of cohesive form led to a jarring experience for Bruce’s dad. Now, if I appear to be suggesting websites must look the same in every browser—you already learned they needn’t—know that I recognize the importance of context, especially in regards to mobile. I made a case for this more than seven years ago. Rather, cohesive UX suggests that form deserves the same respect as function when crafting user experiences that span multiple screens or devices. And users are increasingly comfortable traversing media. For example, more than 40% of adults in the U.S. owning more than one device start an activity on one screen and finish it on another, according to a study commissioned by Facebook. I suspect that percentage will only increase in 2015, and I suspect the tech-affluent readers of 24 ways are among the 40%. There are countless examples of cohesive form and function. Consider Gmail, which displays email conversations visually as a stack that can be expanded and collapsed like the bellows of an accordion. This visual metaphor has been consistent in virtually any instance of Gmail—website or app—since at least 2007 when I captured this screenshot on my Nokia 6680: Screenshot captured while authoring Mobile Web Design (2007). Back then we didn’t call this an app, but rather a ‘smart client’. When the holistic experience is cohesive as it is with Gmail, users’ mental models and even muscle memory are preserved.1 Functionality and aesthetics align with the expectations users have for how things should function and what they should look like. In other words, the experience is roughly the same across screens. But don’t be ridiculous, peoples. Note that I said “roughly.” It’s important to avoid mindless replication of aesthetics and functionality for the sake of cohesion. Again, the goal is a unified whole, not a carbon copy. Affordances and concessions should be made as context and intuition require. For example, while Facebook users are accustomed to top-aligned navigation in the browser, they encounter bottom-aligned navigation in the iOS app as justified by user testing: The iOS app model has held up despite many attempts to better it: http://t.co/rSMSAqeh9m pic.twitter.com/mBp36lAEgc— Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) December 10, 2014 Despite the (rather minor) lack of consistency in navigation placement, other elements such as icons, labels, and color theme work in tandem to produce a unified, holistic whole. Data symmetry Data symmetry involves the repetition, continuity, or synchronicity of data across screens, devices, and platforms. As regards cohesive UX, data includes not just the material (such as an article you’re writing on Medium) but also the actions that can be performed on or with that material (such as Medium’s authoring tools). That is to say, “sync verbs, not just nouns” (Josh Clark). In my estimation, Amazon is an archetype of data symmetry, as is Rdio. When logged in, data is shared across virtually any device of any kind, irrespective of using a browser or native app. Add a product to your Amazon cart from your phone during the morning commute, and finish the transaction at work on your laptop. Easy peasy. Amazon’s aesthetics are crazy cohesive, to boot: Amazon web (left) and native app (right). With Rdio, not only are playlists and listening history synced across screens as you would expect, but the cohesion goes even further. Rdio’s remote control feature allows you to control music playing on one device using another device, all in real time. Rdio’s remote control feature, as viewed on my MacBook while music plays on my iMac. At my office I often work from my couch using my MacBook, but my speakers are connected to my iMac. When signed in to Rdio on both devices, my MacBook serves as proxy for controlling Rdio on my iMac, much the same as any Yosemite-enabled device can serve as proxy for an incoming iPhone call. Me, in my office. Note the iMac and speakers at far right. This is a brilliant example of cohesive design, and it’s executed entirely via the cloud. Things to consider Consider the following when crafting cohesive experiences: Inventory the elements that comprise your product experience, and cohesify them.2 Consider things such as copy, tone, typography, iconography, imagery, flow, placement, brand identification, account data, session data, user preferences, and so on. Then, create cohesion among these elements to the greatest extent possible, while adapting to context as needed. Store session data in the cloud rather than locally. For example, avoid using browser cookies to store shopping cart data, as cookies are specific to a single browser on a single device. Instead, store this data in the cloud so it can be accessed from other devices, as well as beyond the browser. Consider using web views when developing your native app. “You’re already using web apps in native wrappers without even noticing it,” Lukas Mathis contends. “The fact that nobody even notices, the fact that this isn’t a story, shows that, when it comes to user experience, web vs. native doesn’t matter anymore.” Web views essentially allow you to display HTML content inside a native wrapper. This can reduce the time and effort needed to make the overall experience cohesive. So whereas the navigation bar may be rendered by the app, for example, the remaining page display may be rendered via the web. There’s readily accessible documentation for using web views in C++, iOS, Android, and so forth. Nature is calling Returning to the example of Yosemite and sychronized phone calls, is it really that bizarre in light of cohesive UX? Perhaps at first. But I suspect that, over time, Yosemite’s cohesiveness — and the cohesiveness of other examples like the ones we’ve discussed here — will become not only more natural but more commonplace, too. 1 I browse Flipboard on my iPad nearly every morning as part of my breakfast routine. Swiping horizontally advances to the next page. Countless times I’ve done the same gesture in Flipboard for iPhone only to have it do nothing. This is because the gesture for advancing is vertical on phones. I’m so conditioned to the horizontal swipe that I often fail to make the switch to vertical swipe, and apparently others suffer from the same muscle memory, too. 2 Cohesify isn’t a thing. But chances are you understood what I meant. Yay neologism!",2014,Cameron Moll,cameronmoll,2014-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/cohesive-ux/,ux 43,Content Production Planning,"While everyone agrees that getting the content of a website right is vital to its success, unless you’re lucky enough to have an experienced editor or content strategist on board, planning content production often seems to fall through the cracks. One reason is that, for most of the team, it feels like someone else’s problem. Not necessarily a specific person’s problem. Just someone else’s. It’s only when everyone starts urgently asking when the content is going to be ready, that it becomes clear the answer is, “Not as soon as we’d like it”. The good news is that there are some quick and simple things you can do, even if you’re not the official content person on a project, to get everyone on the same content planning page. Content production planning boils down to answering three deceptively simple questions: What content do you need? How much of it do you need? Who’s going to make it? Even if it’s not your job to come up with the answers, by asking these questions early enough and agreeing who is going to come up with the answers, you’ll be a long way towards avoiding the last-minute content problems which so often plague projects. How much content do we need? People tend to underestimate two crucial things about content: how much content they need, and how long that content takes to produce. When I ask someone how big their website is – how many pages it contains – I usually double or triple the answer I get. That’s because almost everyone’s mental model of their website greatly underestimates its true size. You can see the problem for yourself if you look at a site map. Site maps are great at representing a mental model of a website. But because they’re a deliberate simplification they naturally lead us to underestimate how much content is involved in populating them. Several years ago I was asked to help a client create a new microsite (their word) which they wanted ready in two weeks for a conference they were attending. Here’s the site map they had in mind. At first glance it looks like a pretty small website. Maybe twenty to thirty pages? That’s what the client thought. But see those boxes which are multiple boxes stacked on top of one another, for product categories, descriptions and supporting material? They’re known as page stacks, and page stacks are the content strategy equivalent of Here Be Dragons. Say we have: five product categories each with five products which all have two or three supporting documents Those are still fairly small numbers. But small numbers multiplied by other small numbers tend to lead to big numbers. 5 categories = 5 category descriptions plus 5 categories × 5 products each = 25 product descriptions plus 25 products × 2.5 (average) supporting documents = 63 supporting documents equals 93 pages Suddenly our twenty- or thirty-page website is running towards one hundred. That’s probably enough to get most project teams to sit up and take notice. But there’s still the danger of underestimating how long it’s going to take to create the content. After all, assuming the supporting documents already exist in some form, there are only about twenty-five to thirty pages of new copy to write. How much work is it? Again, we have the problem that small numbers when multiplied by other small numbers tend to lead to big numbers. Let’s make a rough guess that it’ll take four hours to write each product category and description page we need. That feels a little conservative if we’re writing stuff from scratch, but assuming the person doing it already knows the products fairly well it’s not unreasonable. 30 pages × 4 hours each = 120 hours 120 hours ÷ 7.5 working hours a day = 16 days Ouch. At this point it’s pretty clear we’re not getting this site launched in two weeks. The goal is the conversation By breaking down the site into its content components, and putting some rough estimates on how long each might take to produce, the client instantly realised that there was no way they would be ready to launch it in two weeks. Although we still didn’t know exactly when it would be ready, getting to that realisation right at the start of the project was a major win for everybody. Without it, the design agency would have bust a gut to get the design, front-end and CMS all done in double-quick time, only to find it was all for nothing as barely half the content was ready. As it was, an early discussion about content, albeit a brief one, bought everyone time to tackle the project properly, without pulling any long nights or working weekends. If you haven’t been able to get people to discuss content plans for the project, these kinds of rough estimates should give you enough evidence to get everyone to start taking it seriously. Your goal is to get everyone on the project to a place where they are ready to talk in detail about who is going to create this content, and how long it’s really going to take them, and to get to those conversations before lack of content becomes a problem. Be careful though. It’s best to talk in ranges and round numbers when your estimates are this uncertain. And watch those multipliers. Given small numbers multiplied by other small numbers lead to big numbers, changing just one number can greatly change the overall estimate. I like to run a couple of different scenarios to check what things look like if I’ve under- or overestimated either how many pages we’re going to need, or how long they’re going to take to create. For example: Top end: 30 pages × 5 hours = 150 hours, or 20 days Bottom end: 25 pages × 4 hours = 100 hours, or 13.3 days So rather than say, “I estimate the content will take around sixteen days to produce”, I’m going to say, “I think the content will take about three to four weeks to produce”. Even with qualifiers like estimate and around, sixteen days sounds too precise. Whereas three to four weeks instantly conveys that this is just a rough figure. Who’s going to make it? So, people tend to underestimate two crucial things about content: how much content they need, and how long content takes to write. At this stage, you’re still in danger of the latter, because it’s tempting to simply estimate how much time content takes to write (or record, if we’re talking audio or visual content), and overlook all the other work that needs to goes on around it. Take 24 ways as an example. In terms of our three deceptively simple questions: what is practical articles about web design; how many is twenty-four, one for each day of Advent; and who are experts working on the web, one to write each article. But there’s another who you might not have considered. Someone needs to select those authors in the first place, make sure they deliver their articles on time (and find someone to replace them if they don’t), review drafts, copy-edit and proofread final versions, upload them to the site, promote them, keep an eye on the comments and make sure there are still presents under the tree on Christmas morning. Even if each of those tasks only takes an hour or so, it then needs multiplying by twenty-four (except the presents, obviously). And as we’ve already seen, small numbers multiplied by small numbers quickly turn into much bigger numbers. Just a few hours per article, when multiplied by twenty-four articles, easily multiplies up to days or even weeks of effort. To get a more accurate estimate of how long the different kinds of content are going to take, you need to break down the content production work into its constituent stages, starting with planning, moving on through the main work of creation, to reviewing, approvals and finally publishing. You need to think about who needs to be involved at each step, and how much time they’ll need to do their bit. Taken together, these things make up your content workflow. The workflow will be different for each organisation, but might look something like this: Eddie the web editor will work out the key messages and objectives for each page, and agree them with Mo the marketing director. Eddie will then get Cal, the copywriter, to write the first draft. As part of that, Cal will interview Sam the subject expert to understand the intricacies of the subject and get all the facts straight. Once Cal’s done the first draft, it’ll go to Sam to check for accuracy, while Eddie reviews it for style and message. Once Cal has incorporated their feedback it’s time to get Mo to have a look at the final draft. If Mo’s happy, it’ll get a final proofread, be uploaded to the CMS, and Mo will give the final sign-off and release it for publishing. You can plot this on a table, with the stages of the content production process down the side, and the key roles or personnel along with top. Then the team can estimate how much time they think each of them needs at each stage. Mo (marketing director) Sam (subject expert) Eddie (web editor) Cal (copywriter) Outline: define key messages and objectives 30 min Review outline 15 min First draft 30 min 3 hours Review 1st draft 30 min 30 min 2nd draft 1 hour Review 2nd draft 15 min 15 min 15 min Final amendments 30 min Proofread 15 min Upload 15 min Sign-off 10 min TOTAL 40 min 1 hour 15 min 1 hour 30 min 4 hours 45 min You can then bring out your calculator again, and come up with some more big scary numbers showing how much time it’s going to take for the whole team to get all the content needed not just written, but also planned, reviewed, approved and published. With an experienced team you can run this exercise as a group workshop and get some fairly accurate estimates pretty quickly. If this is all a bit new to you, check out Gather Content’s Content Production Planning for Agencies ebook for a useful guide to common content roles, ballpark estimates for how much time each one needs on a typical piece of content, and how to run a process and estimating workshop to dig into them in more detail. On a small team, one person might play many roles, but you should still sanity-check your estimates by breaking down the process and putting a rough estimate on each stage. With only a couple of people involved, it’s even easier to only include the core activity like writing or recording in your estimates, and forget to allow time for the planning, reviewing, proofreading, publishing and promoting you’ll still need to do. And even in a team of one, if at all possible you should find at least one other person to act as a second pair of eyes, and give anything you produce a quick once-over and proofread before it’s published. Depending on the kind of content you’re making, you should also consider what will happen after it’s published. The full content life cycle should include promotion, monitoring and regular reviews to make sure content stays accurate and up to date. Making sure you have the time and resources available to do all those things for each piece of content is essential for creating a sustainable content programme. The proof of the pudding Even after digging into workflow and getting the whole team involved in estimating, you’re still largely in the realm of the guesstimate. The good news, though, is that you can quite quickly start finding out if your guesstimates are right or not. As soon as you can, pilot the production process with some real content. This is a double-win: you start finding out how long it really takes to produce all this fab new content, and you get real content to work with in designs and prototypes. Once you’ve run a few things through your process, you’ll be able to refine your estimates, confirm your workflow, and give everyone involved a clear idea of when it will all be ready, and what you need from them. Keeping it all on track At this point I like to pull everything together into the content strategist’s favourite tool: the spreadsheet. A simple content production checklist is a bit like a content inventory or audit, but for the content you don’t yet have, not the stuff already done. You can grab an example here. Each piece of content gets its own row, with columns for basic information like page title, ID (which should match the site map), and who’s responsible for making it. You can capture simple details like target audience and key messages here too, though for more complex content, page description tables like those described by Relly Annett-Baker in “Extracting the Content” may be a better tool to use. Just adapt these columns to whatever makes sense for your content. I then have columns to track where each piece is in the production process. I usually keep this simple, with a column each to mark whether it’s draft, final or uploaded. The status column on the left automatically shows the item’s status, using a simple traffic light colour scheme for whether the item is still to do (red), in draft (amber), or done (green). Seeing the whole thing slowly turn from red to green is a nice motivator. If you want to track the workflow in more detail, a kanban board in a tool like Trello is a great way for a team to collaborate on content production, track each item’s progress, and keep an eye out for bottlenecks and delays. Getting to the content strategy conversation It’s a relatively simple exercise, then, to decide not just what kinds of pages you need, but also how many of them: put some rough estimates of effort on the tasks needed to create those pages – not just the writing, but all the other stages of planning, reviewing, approving, publishing and promoting – and then multiply all those things together. This will quickly bring some reality to grand visions and overambitious plans. Do it early enough, and even when the final big scary number is a lot bigger and scarier than everyone thought, you’ll still have time to do something about it. As well as getting everyone on board for some proper content planning activities, that big scary number is your opportunity to get to the real core questions of content strategy: do we really need all this content? Where can existing content be reused and repurposed? How do we prioritise our efforts? What really matters to our readers and users? Time and again, case studies show that less content delivers more: more leads, more sales, more self-service support and savings in the call centre. Although that argument is primarily one you should make from a good-for-the-users perspective, it doesn’t hurt to be able to make it from the cheaper-for-the-business perspective as well, and to have some big scary numbers to back that up.",2014,Sophie Dennis,sophiedennis,2014-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/content-production-planning/,content 44,Taglines and Truisms,"To bring her good luck, “white rabbits” was the first thing that my grandmother said out loud on the first day of every month. We all need a little luck, but we shouldn’t rely on it, especially when it comes to attracting new clients. The first thing we say to a prospective client when they visit our website for the first time helps them to understand not only what we do but why we do it. We can also help them understand why they should choose to work with us over one of our competitors. Take a minute or two to look at your competitors’ websites. What’s the first thing that they say about themselves? Do they say that they “design delightful digital experiences,” “craft beautiful experiences” or “create remarkable digital experiences?” It’s easy to find companies who introduce themselves with what they do, their proposition, but what a company does is only part of their story. Their beliefs and values, what they stand for why they do what they do are also important. When someone visits our websites for the first time, we have only a brief moment to help them understand us. To help us we can learn from the advertising industry, where the job of a tagline is to communicate a concept, deliver a message and sell a product, often using only a few words. When an advertising campaign is effective, its tagline stays with you, sometimes long after that campaign is over. For example, can you remember which company or brand these taglines help to sell? (Answers at the bottom of the article:) The Ultimate Driving Machine Just Do It Don’t Leave Home Without It A clever tagline isn’t just a play on words, although it can include one. A tagline does far more than help make your company memorable. Used well, it brings together notions of what makes your company and what you offer special. Then it expresses those notions in a few words or possibly a short sentence. I’m sure that everyone can find examples of company slogans written in the type of language that should stay within the walls of a marketing department. We can also find taglines where the meaning is buried so deep that the tag itself becomes effectively meaningless. A meaningful tagline supports our ideas about who we are and what we offer, and provides a platform for different executions of them, sometimes over a period of time. For a tagline to work well, it must allow for current and future ideas about a brand. It must also be meaningful to our brand and describe a truism, a truth that need not be a fact or statistic, but something that’s true about us, who we are, what we do and why that’s distinctive. It can be obvious, funny, serious or specific but above all it must be true. It should also be difficult to argue with, making your messages difficult to argue with too. I doubt that I need remind you who this tagline belongs to: There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s MasterCard. That tagline was launched in 1997 by McCann-Erickson along with the “Priceless” campaign and it helped establish MasterCard as a friendlier credit card company, one with a sense of humour. MasterCard’s truism is that the things which really matter in life can’t be bought. They are worth more than anything that a monetary value can be applied to. In expressing that truism through the tagline, MasterCard’s advertising tells people to use not just any credit card, but their MasterCard, to pay for everything they buy. “Guinness is good for you” may have been a stretch, but “Good things come to those who wait” builds on the truism that patience is a virtue and therefore a good pint of Guinness takes time to pour (119.5 seconds. I know you were wondering.) The fact that British Airways flies to more destinations than any other airline is their truism, and led their advertisers to the now famous tagline, “The world’s favourite airline.” At my company, Stuff & Nonsense, we’ve been thinking about taglines as we think about our position within an industry that seems full of companies who “design”, “craft”, and “create” “delightful”, “beautiful”, “remarkable digital experiences”. Much of what made us different has changed along with the type of work we’re interested in doing. Our work’s expanded beyond websites and now includes design for mobile and other media. It’s true we can’t know how or where it will be seen. The ways that we make it are flexible too as we’re careful not to become tied to particular tools or approaches. It’s also true that we’re a small team. One that’s flexible enough to travel around the world to work alongside our clients. We join their in-house teams and we collaborate with them in ways that other agencies often find more difficult. We know that our clients appreciate our flexibility and have derived enormous value from it. We know that we’ve won business because of it and that it’s now a big part of our proposition. Our truism is that we’re flexible, “Fabulously flexible” as our tagline now expresses. And although we know that there may be other agencies who can be similarly flexible – after all, being flexible is not a unique selling proposition – only we do it so fabulously. As the old year rolls into the new, how will your company describe what you do in 2015? More importantly, how will you tell prospective clients why you do it, what matters to you and why they should work with you? Start by writing a list of truisms about your company. Write as many as you can, but then whittle that list down to just one, the most important truth. Work on that truism to create a tagline that’s meaningful, difficult to be argue with and, above all, uniquely yours. Answers The Ultimate Driving Machine (BMW) Just Do It (Nike) Don’t Leave Home Without It (American Express)",2014,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2014-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/taglines-and-truisms/,business 36,Naming Things,"There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. Phil Karlton Being a professional web developer means taking responsibility for the code you write and ensuring it is comprehensible to others. Having a documented code style is one means of achieving this, although the size and type of project you’re working on will dictate the conventions used and how rigorously they are enforced. Working in-house may mean working with multiple developers, perhaps in distributed teams, who are all committing changes – possibly to a significant codebase – at the same time. Left unchecked, this codebase can become unwieldy. Coding conventions ensure everyone can contribute, and help build a product that works as a coherent whole. Even on smaller projects, perhaps working within an agency or by yourself, at some point the resulting product will need to be handed over to a third party. It’s sensible, therefore, to ensure that your code can be understood by those who’ll eventually take ownership of it. Put simply, code is read more often than it is written or changed. A consistent and predictable naming scheme can make code easier for other developers to understand, improve and maintain, presumably leaving them free to worry about cache invalidation. Let’s talk about semantics Names not only allow us to identify objects, but they can also help us describe the objects being identified. Semantics (the meaning or interpretation of words) is the cornerstone of standards-based web development. Using appropriate HTML elements allows us to create documents and applications that have implicit structural meaning. Thanks to HTML5, the vocabulary we can choose from has grown even larger. HTML elements provide one level of meaning: a widely accepted description of a document’s underlying structure. It’s only with the mutual agreement of browser vendors and developers that
indicates a paragraph. Yet (with the exception of widely accepted microdata and microformat schemas) only HTML elements convey any meaning that can be parsed consistently by user agents. While using semantic values for class names is a noble endeavour, they provide no additional information to the visitor of a website; take them away and a document will have exactly the same semantic value. I didn’t always think this was the case, but the real world has a habit of changing your opinion. Much of my thinking around semantics has been informed by the writing of my peers. In “About HTML semantics and front-end architecture”, Nicholas Gallagher wrote: The important thing for class name semantics in non-trivial applications is that they be driven by pragmatism and best serve their primary purpose – providing meaningful, flexible, and reusable presentational/behavioural hooks for developers to use. These thoughts are echoed by Harry Roberts in his CSS Guidelines: The debate surrounding semantics has raged for years, but it is important that we adopt a more pragmatic, sensible approach to naming things in order to work more efficiently and effectively. Instead of focussing on ‘semantics’, look more closely at sensibility and longevity – choose names based on ease of maintenance, not for their perceived meaning. Naming methodologies Front-end development has undergone a revolution in recent years. As the projects we’ve worked on have grown larger and more important, our development practices have matured. The pros and cons of object-orientated approaches to CSS can be endlessly debated, yet their introduction has highlighted the usefulness of having documented naming schemes. Jonathan Snook’s SMACSS (Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS) collects style rules into five categories: base, layout, module, state and theme. This grouping makes it clear what each rule does, and is aided by a naming convention: By separating rules into the five categories, naming convention is beneficial for immediately understanding which category a particular style belongs to and its role within the overall scope of the page. On large projects, it is more likely to have styles broken up across multiple files. In these cases, naming convention also makes it easier to find which file a style belongs to. I like to use a prefix to differentiate between layout, state and module rules. For layout, I use l- but layout- would work just as well. Using prefixes like grid- also provide enough clarity to separate layout styles from other styles. For state rules, I like is- as in is-hidden or is-collapsed. This helps describe things in a very readable way. SMACSS is more a set of suggestions than a rigid framework, so its ideas can be incorporated into your own practice. Nicholas Gallagher’s SUIT CSS project is far more strict in its naming conventions: SUIT CSS relies on structured class names and meaningful hyphens (i.e., not using hyphens merely to separate words). This helps to work around the current limits of applying CSS to the DOM (i.e., the lack of style encapsulation), and to better communicate the relationships between classes. Over the last year, I’ve favoured a BEM-inspired approach to CSS. BEM stands for block, element, modifier, which describes the three types of rule that contribute to the style of a single component. This means that, given the following markup: