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Go for the writing, stay for the experience

I largely agree with Marco Arment’s article about advertising in digital magazines. His response has one little problem for me, though.

The total of something like the New Yorker is much greater than the sum of its parts. Cutting cartoons, illustrations, or sections you don’t read might not seem like giving up much (and to be fair he admits that’s stuff he doesn’t read), but those touches are why we come back every week. It would be a shame to lose them.

I wonder how he’d feel if Apple products came in plain cardboard boxes? Surely the objects within and their utility would be unchanged, but I think we can all agree we’d be missing something special and important.

Linking in Apps

I don’t intend to use this post to make a case for either side in the imaginary debate between web vs. apps, but one point in The Case Against Apps (and for the Web) deserves addressing:

As a web enthusiast, the lack of URLs for apps and the information they contain is my biggest complaint against the app marketplace.

Suppose I read the center article in the “timeline” interface … and then wanted to share it with a friend or among my social network. There is really no good way to do so; the article itself doesn’t have a specific address of its own, nor does the issue as a whole.

While this point is absolutely true, the author’s “biggest complaint” against apps is a straw man. This is true of many current apps, but not a requirement of apps. This problem could be addressed in any number of ways, such as simply mapping app articles to their online equivalent. It is my understanding that this is how The Daily works.

You probably have experience with this frustrating work-around:

Being the savvy and resourceful web user that I am, I went to WIRED.com, found the article I liked, and sent a link to that URL—the web version—to my friend. Just a second or two later, after clicking “Send,” I thought, Why didn’t I just start here in the first place?

There’s no need to throw away the app model just because their publishers haven’t addressed this problem. Let’s hope they do soon.

There are no emergencies in the design profession

It’s easy to blame clients but we do it to ourselves. We commit to unhealthy deadlines — for the work, for us — because we’ve set this precedent. We answer emails at night or on the weekend, or immediately after receiving them, and it sets an expectation that this is OK. Worse, nine out of 10 of the deadlines we commit to are completely artificial.

Think about it the next time you say ‘yes’ when you want to say ‘no’.

Netflix for iPad

Netflix has always seemed like a great advocate for the user, so I’ve been very surprised by their iPad app:

1. Rows of movie suggestions don’t scroll with gestures. This isn’t just a nice feature, it’s contrary to one’s conditioning.
2. You can’t rate movies — or at least you can’t tap the stars to do so. And if you could, the stars are so close to the Play button that you usually end up tapping it instead. This is extremely frustrating, as you end up waiting a lot because the movie starts buffering.
3. When you tap a movie’s icon (the cover of the movie), you get a modal window. But from there, you can’t add the movie to your queue — huh?
4. It would be nice to be able to collapse some of the rows of suggestions and have it remember their positions. I’m rarely interested in “Gripping Documentaries”.
5. The Add to Queue button should change to Remove from Queue if the item is already in your queue. Or at least just disable the button.

And, not specific to the iPad, why when you watch a movie instantly does it remain on your DVD queue (and vice versa)?

There’s probably a lot I’m missing, as these are just the things that got between me and simply hitting the play button last night. Netflix, it’s time to ditch the website wrapped in an iOS app and design this thing for real.

a few good sites

Sonia Chan’s Area 22, the site for Crafty 2010, and Dmig 5, respectively.

Screen shot 2010 09 09 at 12.38.42 PM 640x426 a few good sites design
Screen shot 2010 09 09 at 12.38.37 PM 640x426 a few good sites design
Screen shot 2010 09 09 at 12.48.42 PM 640x434 a few good sites design
Screen shot 2010 09 09 at 12.47.44 PM 640x441 a few good sites design
Screen shot 2010 09 09 at 12.39.14 PM 640x423 a few good sites design

another breed of internet comments

Comments on blogs, as a rule, are worthless at best. At their worst, they’re depressing, vile, and counterproductive. We all know The Classic: left under a fake name (or anonymously), with a fake email address, and no URL, The Classic usually, at its most benign, is something like “FAIL!”, or “Any student could do better”. And as I said, that’s at its most gentle. But this many years into this whole internet thing, The Classic is pretty powerless. We all know it, and know to avoid it.

There are lots of other strains of vile internet comments which don’t get as much bad press as they should, though! A recent one I’ve noticed and come to despise is The Challenge. It usually sets up a false comparison of the form “Let’s see you do better!” or “Why isn’t your work posted here, then?”

First, one need not be able to do any better themselves to give substantive feedback on a topic. This is just bad logic. I didn’t volunteer to lead the U.S. Army in Afghanistan when I suggested that sending more troops might not be the best idea. I could be completely wrong in my assertion, but at no point was my perspective an endorsement of my own abilities to do the job in question. Nowhere in my mind did it occur to me that, because I held this position, I could do a better job than a United States Army general.

And second, The Challenge is very easy to refute. The other day I came across a few of these comments and called their bluff: I looked through some of the links to portfolios supplied by the few honest comment authors who were critical of the post. In less than three minutes, I had found quite a few solid portfolios, and one in particular whose work was leaps and bounds better than the work on trial.

The good thing about depressing internet comments is that they usually don’t hold water.

ogilvy & mather landing pages

Nicely executed landing page at the Ogilvy & Mather site.

Instead of sending you off to a dead-end dedicated page, this semi-transparent overlay is a nice solution. You can see the main site so it keeps you in the O&M experience. It also keeps you on the path to their site, but gives you some — in many cases enough — information en route. If you want details, you can follow the provided link. If not, continue on your way to the main show (see it back there?).
landing ogilvy+mather 640x502 ogilvy & mather landing pages design

the experience of applying for a job at a design studio should not be painful

UPDATED: I’m not trying to pick on them specifically. Most of the forms I found were just as bad.

As you probably know, I’ve been applying for a lot of jobs recently. It seems like the studios that emphasize user experience design in their client work, and as a requirement for their applicants, have some of the worst experiences for applying.

Lots of companies just provide a mailto:, which is generally a bad way to offer a contact option online. It’s not great, but at least it’s not absolutely insanely frustrating like the form featured on HUGE’s website. (At this point, I recommend you go over to their site and try it out for yourself.) I promise this isn’t me being bitter because they didn’t hire me. But since they’ve made it clear that they aren’t going to give me a job, at least I can give them a little free advice, no benefits or vacation time due.

1. When you click ‘Apply’ in the job description page, it pops up a modal box. Now, I love modal boxes because I equally dislike changing pages. However, a modal box with a scroll bar is a joke. Take me to a page with an application form.

2. The close button is in the lower right. Below the scroll bar. WTF? This is nonstandard for every — single — operating system. Ever.

3. The ‘Insert a resume’ button at the top of the form opens another modal box (yes, a modal box inside a scrolling modal box) whose design is Windows95 worthy. It then proceeds to insert the text of your document into the text fields lower in the form, thus entirely breaking the formatting. At best, it looks like shit. At worst, it’s unreadable. You’d think, from casual experience using websites and standard design patterns, that it would upload the .pdf. No. Wrong. Also, if you’re applying for a design position you’d think they’d like to see how you set a page that is nothing but type. If you’re not applying for a design position, it would be nice to know that the applicant can create a professional document.

There are also similar links above the fields themselves. Huh?

4. The technology used to parse the .pdf into the form fields sucks. As in, it thought that the filename was my last name. Yes, I’m Jacob Resume_v3.2.

I don’t expect it to work perfectly, but if it’s that bad just don’t use it.

5. This is minor in comparison, but you denote mandatory fields with an asterisk, but insist on still putting a horizontal rule and the text ‘Optional information’ for the fields that follow them.

6. The final ‘eff you’ in the experience is the automated response you get. Gee, thanks. I took the time to fight with your stupid form so that I could ask for a job, yet you couldn’t take the time to acknowledge that? Seems like a fair trade. I know you get a lot of applications, so just have the form confirm that it received the application and spare me the automated response. Or at least rewrite the copy so that I could possibly be tricked into thinking it was written by a human being.

In light of this horrid design, who are you to judge my work? That said, I’m still looking for a job so if you need someone to redesign it, please use my contact form (I promise, it won’t make you cry out of frustration).

A small, sporadically updated, entropic, but very good weblog by Jacob Heftmann.

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