rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic
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
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
26,Integrating Contrast Checks in Your Web Workflow,"It’s nearly Christmas, which means you’ll be sure to find an overload of festive red and green decorating everything in sight—often in the ugliest ways possible.
While I’m not here to battle holiday tackiness in today’s 24 ways, it might just be the perfect reminder to step back and consider how we can implement colour schemes in our websites and apps that are not only attractive, but also legible and accessible for folks with various types of visual disabilities.
This simulated photo demonstrates how red and green Christmas baubles could appear to a person affected by protanopia-type colour blindness—not as festive as you might think. Source: Derek Bruff
I’ve been fortunate to work with Simply Accessible to redesign not just their website, but their entire brand. Although the new site won’t be launching until the new year, we’re excited to let you peek under the tree and share a few treats as a case study into how we tackled colour accessibility in our project workflow. Don’t worry—we won’t tell Santa!
Create a colour game plan
A common misconception about accessibility is that meeting compliance requirements hinders creativity and beautiful design—but we beg to differ. Unfortunately, like many company websites and internal projects, Simply Accessible has spent so much time helping others that they had not spent enough time helping themselves to show the world who they really are. This was the perfect opportunity for them to practise what they preached.
After plenty of research and brainstorming, we decided to evolve the existing Simply Accessible brand. Or, rather, salvage what we could. There was no established logo to carry into the new design (it was a stretch to even call it a wordmark), and the Helvetica typography across the site lacked any character. The only recognizable feature left to work with was colour. It was a challenge, for sure: the oranges looked murky and brown, and the blues looked way too corporate for a company like Simply Accessible. We knew we needed to inject a lot of personality.
The old Simply Accessible website and colour palette.
After an audit to round up every colour used throughout the site, we dug in deep and played around with some ideas to bring some new life to this palette.
Choose effective colours
Whether you’re starting from scratch or evolving an existing brand, the first step to having an effective and legible palette begins with your colour choices. While we aren’t going to cover colour message and meaning in this article, it’s important to understand how to choose colours that can be used to create strong contrast—one of the most important ways to create hierarchy, focus, and legibility in your design.
There are a few methods of creating effective contrast.
Light and dark colours
The contrast that exists between light and dark colours is the most important attribute when creating effective contrast.
Try not to use colours that have a similar lightness next to each other in a design.
The red and green colours on the left share a similar lightness and don’t provide enough contrast on their own without making some adjustments. Removing colour and showing the relationship in greyscale reveals that the version on the right is much more effective.
It’s important to remember that red and green colour pairs cause difficulty for the majority of colour-blind people, so they should be avoided wherever possible, especially when placed next to each other.
Complementary contrast
Effective contrast can also be achieved by choosing complementary colours (other than red and green), that are opposite each other on a colour wheel.
These colour pairs generally work better than choosing adjacent hues on the wheel.
Cool and warm contrast
Contrast also exists between cool and warm colours on the colour wheel.
Imagine a colour wheel divided into cool colours like blues, purples, and greens, and compare them to warm colours like reds, oranges and yellows.
Choosing a dark shade of a cool colour, paired with a light tint of a warm colour will provide better contrast than two warm colours or two cool colours.
Develop colour concepts
After much experimentation, we settled on a simple, two-colour palette of blue and orange, a cool-warm contrast colour scheme. We added swatches for call-to-action messaging in green, error messaging in red, and body copy and form fields in black and grey. Shades and tints of blue and orange were added to illustrations and other design elements for extra detail and interest.
First stab at a new palette.
We introduced the new palette for the first time on an internal project to test the waters before going full steam ahead with the website. It gave us plenty of time to get a feel for the new design before sharing it with the public.
Putting the test palette into practice with an internal report
It’s important to be open to changes in your palette as it might need to evolve throughout the design process. Don’t tell your client up front that this palette is set in stone. If you need to tweak the colour of a button later because of legibility issues, the last thing you want is your client pushing back because it’s different from what you promised.
As it happened, we did tweak the colours after the test run, and we even adjusted the logo—what looked great printed on paper looked a little too light on screens.
Consider how colours might be used
Don’t worry if you haven’t had the opportunity to test your palette in advance. As long as you have some well-considered options, you’ll be ready to think about how the colour might be used on the site or app.
Obviously, in such early stages it’s unlikely that you’re going to know every element or feature that will appear on the site at launch time, or even which design elements could be introduced to the site later down the road. There are, of course, plenty of safe places to start.
For Simply Accessible, I quickly mocked up these examples in Illustrator to get a handle on the elements of a website where contrast and legibility matter the most: text colours and background colours. While it’s less important to consider the contrast of decorative elements that don’t convey essential information, it’s important for a reader to be able to discern elements like button shapes and empty form fields.
A basic list of possible colour combinations that I had in mind for the Simply Accessible website
Run initial tests
Once these elements were laid out, I manually plugged in the HTML colour code of each foreground colour and background colour on Lea Verou’s Contrast Checker. I added the results from each colour pair test to my document so we could see at a glance which colours needed adjustment or which colours wouldn’t work at all.
Note: Read more about colour accessibility and contrast requirements
As you can see, a few problems were revealed in this test. To meet the minimum AA compliance, we needed to slightly darken the green, blue, and orange background colours for text—an easy fix. A more complicated problem was apparent with the button colours. I had envisioned some buttons appearing over a blue background, but the contrast ratios were well under 3:1. Although there isn’t a guide in WCAG for contrast requirements of two non-text elements, the ISO and ANSI standard for visible contrast is 3:1, which is what we decided to aim for.
We also checked our colour combinations in Color Oracle, an app that simulates the most extreme forms of colour blindness. It confirmed that coloured buttons over blue backgrounds was simply not going to work. The contrast was much too low, especially for the more common deuteranopia and protanopia-type deficiencies.
How our proposed colour pairs could look to people with three types of colour blindness
Make adjustments if necessary
As a solution, we opted to change all buttons to white when used over dark coloured backgrounds. In addition to increasing contrast, it also gave more consistency to the button design across the site instead of introducing a lot of unnecessary colour variants.
Putting more work into getting compliant contrast ratios at this stage will make the rest of implementation and testing a breeze. When you’ve got those ratios looking good, it’s time to move on to implementation.
Implement colours in style guide and prototype
Once I was happy with my contrast checks, I created a basic style guide and added all the colour values from my colour exploration files, introduced more tints and shades, and added patterned backgrounds. I created examples of every panel style we were planning to use on the site, with sample text, links, and buttons—all with working hover states. Not only does this make it easier for the developer, it allows you to check in the browser for any further contrast issues.
Run a final contrast check
During the final stages of testing and before launch, it’s a good idea to do one more check for colour accessibility to ensure nothing’s been lost in translation from design to code. Unless you’ve introduced massive changes to the design in the prototype, it should be fairly easy to fix any issues that arise, particularly if you’ve stayed on top of updating any revisions in the style guide.
One of the more well-known evaluation tools, WAVE, is web-based and will work in any browser, but I love using Chrome’s Accessibility Tools. Not only are they built right in to the Inspector, but they’ll work if your site is password-protected or private, too.
Chrome’s Accessibility Tools audit feature shows that there are no immediate issues with colour contrast in our prototype
The human touch
Finally, nothing beats a good round of user testing. Even evaluation tools have their flaws. Although they’re great at catching contrast errors for text and backgrounds, they aren’t going to be able to find errors in non-text elements, infographics, or objects placed next to each other where discernible contrast is important.
Our final palette, compared with our initial ideas, was quite different, but we’re proud to say it’s not just compliant, but shows Simply Accessible’s true personality. Who knows, it may not be final at all—there are so many opportunities down the road to explore and expand it further.
Accessibility should never be an afterthought in a project. It’s not as simple as adding alt text to images, or running your site through a compliance checker at the last minute and assuming that a pass means everything is okay. Considering how colour will be used during every stage of your project will help avoid massive problems before launch, or worse, launching with serious issues.
If you find yourself working on a personal project over the Christmas break, try integrating these checks into your workflow and make colour accessibility a part of your New Year’s resolutions.",2014,Geri Coady,gericoady,2014-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/integrating-contrast-checks-in-your-web-workflow/,design
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:
Rudolph
Dasher
Dancer
Prancer
Vixen
Comet
Cupid
Dunder
Blixem
I know that:
.sleigh is a containing block or component.
.sleigh__reindeer is used only as a descendent element of .sleigh.
.sleigh__reindeer––famous is used only as a modifier of .sleigh__reindeer.
With this naming scheme in place, I know which styles relate to a particular component, and which are shared. Beyond reducing specificity-related head-scratching, this approach has given me a framework within which I can consistently label items, and has sped up my workflow considerably.
Each of these methodologies shows that any robust CSS naming convention will have clear rules around case (lowercase, camelCase, PascalCase) and the use of special (allowed) characters like hyphens and underscores.
What makes for a good name?
Regardless of higher-level conventions, there’s no getting away from the fact that, at some point, we’re still going to have to name things. Recognising that classes should be named with other developers in mind, what makes for a good name?
Understandable
The most important aspect is for a name to be understandable. Words used in your project may come from a variety of sources: some may be widely understood, and others only be recognised by people working within a particular environment.
Culture
Most words you’ll choose will have common currency outside the world of web development, although they may have a particular interpretation among developers (think menu, list, input). However, words may have a narrower cultural significance; for example, in Germany and other German-speaking countries, impressum is the term used for legally mandated statements of ownership.
Industry
Industries often use specific terms to describe common business practices and concepts. Publishing has a number of these (headline, standfirst, masthead, colophon…) all have well understood meanings – and not all of them are relevant to online usage.
Organisation
Companies may have internal names (or nicknames) for their products and services. The Guardian is rife with such names: bisons (and buffalos), pixies (and super-pixies), bentos (and mini-bentos)… all of which mean something very different outside the organisation. Although such names can be useful inside smaller teams, in larger organisations they can become a barrier to entry, a sort of secret code used among employees who have been around long enough to know what they mean.
Product
Your team will undoubtedly have created names for specific features or interface components used in your product. For example, at Clearleft we coined the term gravigation for a navigation bar that was pinned to the bottom of the viewport. Elements of a visual design language may have names, too. Transport for London’s bar and circle logo is known internally as the roundel, while Nike’s logo is called the swoosh. Branding agencies often christen colours within a brand palette, too, either to evoke aspects of the identity or to indicate intended usage.
Once you recognise the origin of the words you use, you’ll be better able to judge their appropriateness. Using Latin words for class names may satisfy a need to use semantic-sounding terms but, unless you work in a company whose employees have a basic grasp of Latin, a degree of translation will be required. Military ranks might be a clever way of declaring sizes without implying actual values, but I’d venture most people outside the armed forces don’t know how they’re ordered.
Obvious
Quite often, the first name that comes into your head will be the best option. Names that obliquely reference the function of a class (e.g. receptacle instead of container, kevlar instead of no-bullets) only serve to add an additional layer of abstraction. Don’t overthink it!
One way of knowing if the names you use are well understood is to look at what similar concepts are called in existing vocabularies. schema.org, Dublin Core and the BBC’s ontologies are all useful sources for object names.
Functional
While we’ve learned to avoid using presentational classes, there remains a tension between naming things based on their content, and naming them for their intended presentation or behaviour (which may change at different breakpoints). Rather than think about a component’s appearance or behaviour, instead look to its function, its purpose. To clarify, ask what a component’s function is, and not how the component functions.
For example, the Guardian’s internal content system uses the following names for different types of image placement: supporting, showcase and thumbnail, with inline being the default. These options make no promise of the resulting position on a webpage (or smartphone app, or television screen…), but do suggest intended use, and therefore imply the likely presentation.
Consistent
Being consistent in your approach to names will allow for easier naming of successive components, and extending the vocabulary when necessary. For example, a predictably named hierarchy might use names like primary and secondary. Should another level need to be added, tertiary is clearly be preferred over third.
Appropriate
Your project will feature a mix of style rules. Some will perform utility functions (clearing floats, removing bullets from a list, reseting margins), while others will perform specific functions used only once or twice in a project. Names should reflect this. For commonly used classes, be generic; for unique components be more specific.
It’s also worth remembering that you can use multiple classes on an element, so combining both generic and specific can give you a powerful modular design system:
Generic: list
Specific: naughty-children
Combined: naughty-children list
If following the BEM methodology, you might use the following classes:
Generic: list
Specific: list––nice-children
Combined: list list––nice-children
Extensible
Good naming schemes can be extended. One way of achieving this is to use namespaces, which are basically a way of grouping related names under a higher-level term.
Microformats are a good example of a well-designed naming scheme, with many of its vocabularies taking property names from existing and related specifications (e.g. hCard is a 1:1 representation of vCard). Microformats 2 goes one step further by grouping properties under several namespaces:
h-* for root class names (e.g. h-card)
p-* for simple (text) properties (e.g. p-name)
u-* for URL properties (e.g. u-photo)
dt-* for date/time properties (e.g. dt-bday)
e-* for embedded markup properties (e.g. e-note)
The inclusion of namespaces is a massive improvement over the earlier specification, but the downside is that microformats now occupy five separate namespaces. This might be problematic if you are using u-* for your utility classes. While nothing will break, your naming system won’t be as robust, so plan accordingly.
(Note: Microformats perform a very specific function, separate from any presentational concerns. It’s therefore considered best practice to not use microformat classes as styling hooks, but instead use additional classes that relate to the function of the component and adhere to your own naming conventions.)
Short
Names should be as long as required, but no longer. When looking for words to describe a particular function, I try to look for single words where possible. Avoid abbreviations unless they are understood within the contexts described above. rrp is fine if labelling a recommended retail price in an online shop, but not very helpful if used to mean ragged-right paragraph, for example.
Fun!
Finally, names can be an opportunity to have some fun! Names can give character to a project, be it by providing an outlet for in-jokes or adding little easter eggs for those inclined to look.
The copyright statement on Apple’s website has long been named sosumi, a word that has a nice little history inside Apple. Until recently, the hamburger menu icon on the Guardian website was labelled honest-burger, after the developer’s favourite burger restaurant.
A few thoughts on preprocessors
CSS preprocessors have solved a lot of problems, but they have an unfortunate downside: they require you to name yet more things! Whereas we needed to worry only about style rules, now we need names for variables, mixins, functions… oh my!
A second article could be written about naming these, so for now I’ll offer just a few thoughts. The first is to note that preprocessors make it easier to change things, as they allow for DRYer code. So while the names of variables are important (and the advice in this article still very much applies), you can afford to relax a little.
Looking to name colour variables? If possible, find out if colours have been assigned names in a brand palette. If not, use obvious names (based on appearance or function, depending on your preference) and adapt as the palette grows. If it becomes difficult to name colours that are too similar, I’d venture that the problem lies with the design rather than the naming scheme.
The same is true for responsive breakpoints. Preprocessors allow you to move awkward naming conventions out of the markup and into the CSS. Although terms like mobile, tablet and desktop are not desirable given the need to think about device-agnostic design, if these terms are widely understood within a product team and among stakeholders, using them will ensure everyone is using the same language (they can always be changed later).
It still feels like we’re at the very beginning of understanding how preprocessors fit into a development workflow, if at all! I suspect over the next few years, best practices will emerge for all of these considerations. In the meantime, use your brain!
Even with sensible rules and conventions in place, naming things can remain difficult, but hopefully I’ve made this exercise a little less painful. Christmas is a time of giving, so to the developer reading your code in a year’s time, why not make your gift one of clearer class names.",2014,Paul Lloyd,paulrobertlloyd,2014-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/naming-things/,code
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
28,Why You Should Design for Open Source,"Let’s be honest. Most designers don’t like working for nothing. We rally against spec work and make a stand for contracts and getting paid. That’s totally what you should do as a professional designer in the industry. It’s your job. It’s your hard-working skill. It’s your bread and butter. Get paid.
However, I’m going to make a case for why you could also consider designing for open source. First, I should mention that not all open source work is free work. Some companies hire open source contributors to work on their projects full-time, usually because that project is used by said company. There are other companies that encourage open source contribution and even offer 20%-time for these projects (where you can spend one day a week contributing to open source). These are super rad situations to be in. However, whether you’re able to land a gig doing this type of work, or you’ve decided to volunteer your time and energy, designing for open source can be rewarding in many other ways.
Portfolio building
New designers often find themselves in a catch-22 situation: they don’t have enough work experience showcased in their portfolio, which leads to them not getting much work because their portfolio is bare. These new designers often turn to unsolicited redesigns to fill their portfolio. An unsolicited redesign is a proof of concept in which a designer attempts to redesign a popular website. You can see many of these concepts on sites like Dribbble and Behance and there are even websites dedicated to showcasing these designs, such as Uninvited Designs. There’s even a subreddit for them.
There are quite a few negative opinions on unsolicited redesigns, though some people see things from both sides. If you feel like doing one or two of these to fill your portfolio, that’s of course up to you. But here’s a better suggestion. Why not contribute design for an open source project instead?
You can easily find many projects in great need of design work, from branding to information design, documentation, and website or application design. The benefits to doing this are far better than an unsolicited redesign. You get a great portfolio piece that actually has greater potential to get used (especially if the core team is on board with it). It’s a win-win situation.
Not all designers are in need of portfolio filler, but there are other benefits to contributing design.
Giving back to the community
My first experience with voluntary work was when I collaborated with my friend, Vineet Thapar, on a pro bono project for the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative redesign project back in 2004. I was very excited to contribute CSS to a website that would get used by the W3C! Unfortunately, it decided to go a different direction and my work did not get used. However, it was still pretty exciting to have the opportunity, and I don’t regret a moment of that work. I learned a lot about accessibility from this experience and it helped me land some of the jobs I’ve had since.
Almost a decade later, I got super into Sass. One of the core maintainers, Chris Eppstein, lamented on Twitter one day that the Sass website and brand was in dire need of design help. That led to the creation of an open source task force, Team Sass Design, and we revived the brand and the website, which launched at SassConf in 2013.
It helped me in my current job. I showed it during my portfolio review when I interviewed for the role. Then I was able to use inspiration from a technique I’d tried on the Sass website to help create the more feature-rich design system that my team at work is building. But most importantly, I soon learned that it is exhilarating to be a part of the Sass community. This is the biggest benefit of all. It feels really good to give back to the technology I love and use for getting my work done.
Ben Werdmuller writes about the need for design in open source. It’s great to see designers contributing to open source in awesome ways. When A List Apart’s website went open source, Anna Debenham contributed by helping build its pattern library. Bevan Stephens worked with FontForge on the design of its website. There are also designers who have created their own open source projects. There’s Dan Cederholm’s Pears, which shares common patterns in markup and style. There’s also Brad Frost’s Pattern Lab, which shares his famous method of atomic design and applies it to a design system. These systems and patterns have been used in real-world projects, such as RetailMeNot, so designers have contributed to the web in an even larger way simply by putting their work out there for others to use. That’s kind of fun to think about.
How to get started
So are you stoked about getting into the open source community? That’s great!
Initially, you might get worried or uncomfortable in getting involved. That’s okay. But first consider that the project is open source for a reason. Your contribution (no matter how large or small) can help in a big way.
If you find a project you’re interested in helping, make sure you do your research. Sometimes project team members will be attached to their current design. Is there already a designer on the core team? Reach out to that designer first. Don’t be too aggressive with why you think your design is better than theirs. Rather, offer some constructive feedback and a proposal of what would make the design better. Chances are, if the designer cares about the project, and you make a strong case, they’ll be up for it.
Are there contribution guidelines? It’s proper etiquette to read these and follow the community’s rules. You’ll have a better chance of getting your work accepted, and it shows that you take the time to care and add to the overall quality of the project. Does the project lack guidelines? Consider starting a draft for that before getting started in the design.
When contributing to open source, use your initiative to solve problems in a manageable way. Huge pull requests are hard to review and will often either get neglected or rejected. Work in small, modular, and iterative contributions.
So this is my personal take on what I’ve learned from my experience and why I love open source. I’d love to hear from you if you have your own experience in doing this and what you’ve learned along the way as well. Please share in the comments!
Thanks Drew McLellan, Eric Suzanne, Kyle Neath for sharing their thoughts with me on this!",2014,Jina Anne,jina,2014-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/why-you-should-design-for-open-source/,design
48,A Holiday Wish,"A friend and I were talking the other day about why clients spend more on toilet cleaning than design, and how the industry has changed since the mid-1990s, when we got our starts. Early in his career, my friend wrote a fine CSS book, but for years he has called himself a UX designer. And our conversation got me thinking about how I reacted to that title back when I first started hearing it.
“Just what this business needs,” I said to myself, “another phony expert.”
Okay, so I was wrong about UX, but my touchiness was not altogether unfounded. In the beginning, our industry was divided between freelance jack-of-all-trade punks, who designed and built and coded and hosted and Photoshopped and even wrote the copy when the client couldn’t come up with any, and snot-slick dot-com mega-agencies that blew up like Alice and handed out titles like impoverished nobles in the years between the world wars.
I was the former kind of designer, a guy who, having failed or just coasted along at a cluster of other careers, had suddenly, out of nowhere, blossomed into a web designer—an immensely curious designer slash coder slash writer with a near-insatiable lust to shave just one more byte from every image. We had modems back then, and I dreamed in sixteen colors. My source code was as pretty as my layouts (arguably prettier) and I hoovered up facts and opinions from newsgroups and bulletin boards as fast as any loudmouth geek could throw them. It was a beautiful life.
But soon, too soon, the professional digital agencies arose, buying loft buildings downtown, jacking in at T1 speeds, charging a hundred times what I did, and communicating with their clients in person, in large artfully bedecked rooms, wearing hand-tailored Barney’s suits and bringing back the big city bullshit I thought I’d left behind when I quit advertising to become a web designer.
Just like the big bad ad agencies of my early career, the new digital agencies stocked every meeting with a totem pole worth of ranks and titles. If the client brought five upper middle managers to the meeting, the agency did likewise. If fifteen stakeholders got to ask for a bigger logo, fifteen agency personnel showed up to take notes on the percentage of enlargement required.
But my biggest gripe was with the titles.
The bigger and more expensive the agency, the lousier it ran with newly invented titles. Nobody was a designer any more. Oh, no. Designer, apparently, wasn’t good enough. Designer was not what you called someone you threw that much money at.
Instead of designers, there were user interaction leads and consulting middleware integrators and bilabial experience park rangers and you name it. At an AIGA Miami event where I was asked to speak in the 1990s, I once watched the executive creative director of the biggest dot-com agency of the day make a presentation where he spent half his time bragging that the agency had recently shaved down the number of titles for people who basically did design stuff from forty-six to just twenty-three—he presented this as though it were an Einsteinian coup—and the other half of his time showing a film about the agency’s newly opened branch in Oslo. The Oslo footage was shot in December. I kept wondering which designer in the audience who lived in the constant breezy balminess of Miami they hoped to entice to move to dark, wintry Norway. But I digress.
Shortly after I viewed this presentation, the dot-com world imploded, brought about largely by the euphoric excess of the agencies and their clients. But people still needed websites, and my practice flourished—to the point where, in 1999, I made the terrifying transition from guy in his underwear working freelance out of his apartment to head of a fledgling design studio. (Note: you never stop working on that change.)
I had heard about experience design in the 1990s, but assumed it was a gig for people who only knew one font.
But sometime around 2004 or 2005, among my freelance and small-studio colleagues, like a hobbit in the Shire, I began hearing whispers in the trees of a new evil stirring. The fires of Mordor were burning. Web designers were turning in their HTML editing tools and calling themselves UXers.
I wasn’t sure if they pronounced it “uck-sir,” or “you-ex-er,” but I trusted their claims to authenticity about as far as I trusted the actors in a Doctor Pepper commercial when they claimed to be Peppers. I’m an UXer, you’re an UXer, wouldn’t you like to be an UXer too? No thanks, said I. I still make things. With my hands.
Such was my thinking. I may have earned an MFA at the end of some long-past period of soul confusion, but I have working-class roots and am profoundly suspicious of, well, everything, but especially of anything that smacks of pretense. I got exporting GIFs. I didn’t get how white papers and bullet points helped anybody do anything.
I was wrong. And gradually I came to know I was wrong. And before other members of my tribe embraced UX, and research, and content strategy, and the other airier consultant services, I was on board. It helped that my wife of the time was a librarian from Michigan, so I’d already bought into the cult of information architecture. And if I wasn’t exactly the seer who first understood how borderline academic practices related to UX could become as important to our medium and industry as our craft skills, at least I was down a lot faster than Judd Apatow got with feminism. But I digress.
I love the web and all the people in it. Today I understand design as a strategic practice above all. The promise of the web, to make all knowledge accessible to all people, won’t be won by HTML5, WCAG 2, and responsive web design alone.
We are all designers. You may call yourself a front-end developer, but if you spend hours shaving half-seconds off an interaction, that’s user experience and you, my friend, are a designer. If the client asks, “Can you migrate all my old content to the new CMS?” and you answer, “Of course we can, but should we?”, you are a designer. Even our users are designers. Think about it.
Once again, as in the dim dumb dot-com past, we seem to be divided by our titles. But, O, my friends, our varied titles are only differing facets of the same bright gem. Sisters, brothers, we are all designers. Love on! Love on!
And may all your web pages, cards, clusters, clumps, asides, articles, and relational databases be bright.",2014,Jeffrey Zeldman,jeffreyzeldman,2014-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/a-holiday-wish/,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
42,An Overview of SVG Sprite Creation Techniques,"SVG can be used as an icon system to replace icon fonts. The reasons why SVG makes for a superior icon system are numerous, but we won’t be going over them in this article. If you don’t use SVG icons and are interested in knowing why you may want to use them, I recommend you check out “Inline SVG vs Icon Fonts” by Chris Coyier – it covers the most important aspects of both systems and compares them with each other to help you make a better decision about which system to choose.
Once you’ve made the decision to use SVG instead of icon fonts, you’ll need to think of the best way to optimise the delivery of your icons, and ways to make the creation and use of icons faster.
Just like bitmaps, we can create image sprites with SVG – they don’t look or work exactly alike, but the basic concept is pretty much the same.
There are several ways to create SVG sprites, and this article will give you an overview of three of them. While we’re at it, we’re going to take a look at some of the available tools used to automate sprite creation and fallback for us.
Prerequisites
The content of this article assumes you are familiar with SVG. If you’ve never worked with SVG before, you may want to look at some of the introductory tutorials covering SVG syntax, structure and embedding techniques. I recommend the following:
SVG basics: Using SVG.
Structure: Structuring, Grouping, and Referencing in SVG — The ,