Posts in the Personal Category

Available as of this morning from A Book Apart in both digital and paper formats: Design for Real Life, the book Sara Wachter-Boettcher and I started writing not quite a year ago.

Anil Dash was kind enough to write a wonderful foreword for the book, in which he perfectly describes the background we were working against:

Two billion people now have some kind of access to internet technologies, and almost all of them are spending more and more time with their thumbs flicking across their phones. And the technology they’re using has a real impact on their lives. They don’t use an app to “share photos”; they use it to maintain a relationship with distant family. They don’t need to do “online banking”; they need to lend a friend money to help them out of a jam. Nobody wants to learn a complicated set of privacy controls; they just want to be able to express themselves without antagonizing bosses or in-laws.

Our thesis, against that, was to say, “As personal and digital lives become closer and effectively merge, the things we design will have to work harder and harder to deal with real people in all their messy complexity.  How can we start people thinking about this, and what tools can we give them?”  That’s what we strove to create, and now you can judge for yourself whether we succeeded.

I’ll be honest: we were pretty scared as we wrote it.  This is not a topic area that’s gotten a ton of attention, and in a lot of ways we were breaking new ground — but, at the same time, we were very aware that there was existing research and knowledge in related areas, so we wanted to be sure we were inclusive or, and respectful of, that work.  We talked to a lot of people in a variety of disciplines, trying to make sure we brought in information that would help the reader and not flying in the face of things that were already known.

So you can imagine our relief and gratitude as we’ve heard glowing reactions from people who read preview drafts — among them Kim Goodwin, Indi Young, Sara Soueidan, Caren Litherland, and Karen McGrane.  Paul Ford said, “Anyone who aspires to build global products that people love should read this book now,” and Kate Kiefer Lee said, “It will be required reading on my team.”

You might think cover blurbs like those are pure marketing fluff, and maybe in some genres they are.  For us, they serve double duty: to let you know that people who know what they’re talking about believe we know what we’re talking about, and also to let us know that.  There were days we weren’t entirely certain.

To be clear, this isn’t a book about forever treating people with kid gloves.  We say “compassion isn’t coddling”, and that’s absolutely the case.  An error message still needs to convey the error; an account lockout still needs to keep the account locked.  But how we convey errors or lockouts, and how we make people aware of the possible ramifications of their actions, is critical.  Just as there are good ways and bad ways to commiserate with a grieving friend or handle a difficult work situation, there are good ways and bad ways to approach people in our designs.

As I said before, we need to deal with real people, in all their messy complexity.  We hope Design for Real Life is the start of a whole new conversation within our field, one that will teach Sara and me just as much as anyone else about how we can be more thoughtful and humane in what we create.

• Design For Real Life Now Available was published on Tuesday, March 8th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Books, Design, Projects, and Writing categories.
• There have been two replies.

On March 8th, 2016 — just eight days from the day I’m writing this — Design for Real Life will be available from A Book Apart.  My co-author Sara Wachter-Boettcher and I are really looking forward to getting it into people’s hands.

The usual fashion is to say something like “getting it into people’s hands at long last”, but in this case, that’s not really how it went down.  Just over a year ago now, Sara published “Personal Histories”, and it was a revelation.  In her post, I could see the other half of the book that was developing in my head, a book that was growing out of “Designing for Crisis” and “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty”.  So I emailed Sara and opened with:

Your post was like a bolt of lightning for me.  In the same way the Year in Review thing opened my eyes to what lay beyond “Designing for Crisis”, your post opened my eyes to how far that land beyond reaches.

After research and some intense discussions, we started writing in the spring of 2015, and finished before summer was over.  Fall of 2015 was devoted to rewrites, revisions, additions, and editing.  Winter 2015-2016 was spent in collaborative editorial and production work by the amazing team at A Book Apart.  And now…here we are.  The book is just a week away from being in people’s hands.

To celebrate, Sara and I will be hosting, with incredibly generous support from A Book Apart and PhillyCHI, a launch party at Frankford Hall in Philadelphia.  We’ll be providing some munchies, some tasty adult beverages, and there will be giveaways of both paper and digital copies of the book.  We’d love to see you there!  If you can make it, please do RSVP at that link, so we know how much food to order.

We chose Philadelphia as the site for our launch party for a few reasons.  For one, Sara lives there, so only one of us had to travel.  But to me, it brings some very personal histories full circle, because Philadelphia is where this really all got started.  It’s where Rebecca first went to be treated, where she was given the best possible shot at life, and where I started to notice the failures and successes of user experience design when it collided with the stresses of real life.

In a number of ways, this book has been a labor of love.  The most important, I think, is the love Sara and I have for our field, and how we would love to see it become more humane — really, more human.  That’s why we packed the book not just with examples of good and bad design choices, but of how we can do better.  The whole second part of the book is about how to take the principles we explore in the first part and put them to work right now — not by throwing out your current process and replacing it with a whole new, but by bringing them into your existing practice.  It’s very much about enhancing what you already do.

It’s been an intense process, both emotionally and work-wise.  We pushed as hard as we could to get this to you as soon as we could.  Now the time is almost here.  We’re really looking forward to hearing what you think of it.

• Design for Real Life was published on Monday, February 29th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Books, Design, and Web categories.
• There have been four replies.

Back in October of 2014, at An Event Apart Orlando, I returned to public speaking with “Designing for Crisis”, my first steps toward illuminating how and why design needs to consider more than just the usual use cases.  I continued refining and delivering that talk throughout 2015, and it was recorded in October 2015 at An Event Apart Austin.  As of late last week, you can see the entire talk for free.

There were a lot of strange confluences that went into that talk, some of them horrific, others just remarkable.  One that stands out for me, as I look at that screenshot, is how a few years ago, Jared Spool gave a talk at AEA where he discussed the GE Adventure Series, in a segment that never failed to choke me up (and often choked up Jared).  I remember being completely floored by that example, and at one point, based solely on what he’d said about the GE Adventure Series, I remarked to Jared that I occasionally thought about switching career tracks to become an experience designer.

Less than two years later, I stood in one of the first Adventure Series rooms at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, standing in the middle of a design I’d only ever seen on a projector screen, the same room you can see in the screenshot above, as my daughter’s head was scanned to see if the experimental medicine we’d been giving her had slowed her tumors.

Six months after that, I was talking about it on stage in Orlando, as an example of how designing for crisis can have spectacularly positive results.  The video we released last week came a year later, and is a much better version of that first talk.  I’m very happy that we can now share it with the world.

As I’ve said before, I came to realize that “Designing for Crisis” was just one piece of a larger puzzle.  To start exploring and understanding the whole puzzle, I recently finished co-authoring Design for Real Life with Sara Wachter-Boettcher, to be published by A Book Apart, possibly as soon as March (but there’s not an official date yet, so that could change).  In it, Sara and I explore a small set of principles to use in approaching design work, and talk about how to incorporate those principles into your existing design practice.  The book is the foundation for a new talk I’ll be presenting at every An Event Apart in 2016 — including this year’s Special Edition show in Orlando.

As soon as the book is available for order, we’ll let everyone know — but for now, I hope you’ll find last year’s talk useful and enlightening.  Several people have told me it changed the way they approach their work, and it serves as a pretty good introduction to the ideas and themes I’ve built on it for the book and this year’s talk, so I hope it will be an hour well spent.

• Designing for Crisis, Design for Real Life was published on Monday, January 25th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart, Design, Speaking, and Web categories.
• There have been seven replies.

A year ago today, I went onto Facebook and was shocked by what I saw.  After a few moments, I started thinking through what had happened, and why, and decided to quickly blog about it.  Before a week had gone by, that post had become a news story covered around the world, showing up in newsprint and on web sites, leading to interviews and more.  There was a moment where I was sitting in my office with my daughter when she looked over, took in my expression, and asked me if I was okay.  I couldn’t speak for a minute.  The story had just hit TIME Magazine and the New York Times.  It was a truly surreal experience.

From out of that experience, a lot of things grew.  I realized that “Designing for Crisis” was one piece of a larger topic, started to get a handle on that topic, and teamed up with Sara Wachter-Boettcher to create a book which we just finished writing, title to be announced shortly, and expect to be on shelves within a few months.

In parallel to that, I was asked to talk with the design and content teams at Facebook, which I did in the spring of 2015.  It was an incredibly productive and honest discussion, entirely because the team at Facebook was truly concerned and open to change.  You can see how this has evolved over time in On This Day, whose messaging has become more human and sensitive to the possibility of harm.  And you can especially see it in the 2015 edition of Year in Review.

Whereas last year, the YiR feature was clearly designed around awesome years and happy people, this year’s is a lot more respectful and careful.  It isn’t as dynamic, but when it comes to memories, this seems entirely appropriate.  As Sara and I say in our book, this is “what it looks like when an organization embeds caring into its product, and is willing to own up to mistakes”.

I know the Facebook copy “we care about you and the memories you share” has been derided in some quarters, because people reflexively assume that no company (least of all Facebook) actually cares about you as anything more than a sales unit.  Maybe that’s true of some parts of Facebook — it’s a very large company, after all, with a lot of competing fiefdoms — but the design and content teams were writing from the heart.  They honestly do care about the people who use their products, and they care very much about how their work affects people.  They know they’ll stumble sometimes, but they’re committed to trying anyway and learning from their stumbles.  For that alone, they have my deepest respect.  To forge ahead in front of an audience of well over a billion people takes an incredible amount of courage.

Year in Review will be a part of the talk I’ll be giving in 2016 at An Event Apart, just as it was of Sara’s and my forthcoming book.  In brief, the assessment that you’ll find in both places: Year in Review 2015 is a significant step forward, a great example of compassionate design at scale.  I applaud Facebook for forging a path forward.

• A “Year in Review” Review was published on Thursday, December 24th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Design, and Speaking categories.
• There have been two replies.

As Rebecca’s Boardwalk wound down, one of our friends came up to me to say goodbye.  “This was just great, such a tribute,” she said.  “I know it must have been a really hard day for you.”

Instead of replying directly, I thanked her for coming, because I didn’t know how to tell her that it hadn’t really been hard at all.  Not in the way she’d meant, anyway.

It was eighteen months ago today that, in the span of half a day, Rebecca turned six and died.  Although I have tried in various ways, there is really no way to express what that was like.  There is no way I have found to convey the feeling of saying goodbye to your child forever, nor of what it takes to tell her it’s okay to go.  Those who understand have done it themselves.  Those who haven’t, don’t, and I hope for their sakes they never do.

In the time since, I’ve devoted a lot of time and attention to grieving.  Just as Kat and I were with Rebecca’s last weeks, and with her cancer treatment, and as we have been with the raising of all our children, and in most of what we do in life, I have been — for lack of a better term — deeply mindful of my grieving.  I don’t mean to link it to the current fad of “mindfulness”, which I know next to nothing about.  I just mean that Kat and I always try to be present for the present, and keenly aware of the future.  Acting locally and thinking globally, temporally speaking.

What I’m really trying to say is that a couple of months ago, more or less, I realized that I had turned a corner.  The agony of immediate grief has passed.  When I think of Rebecca, and even of her death, it is not a knife in my heart and guts.  Sometimes it’s a dull ache, and sometimes it just…is.

And then sometimes, when I think of her, I think of the happy times and smile.  They are memories very much like those I have for Carolyn and Joshua, when I think back to a special day we shared, or a family trip, or a moment of accomplishment.  The sort of wistful, sweet, I remember-when smile that lightly touches the heart.  And if I then remember that there will be no more such moments, it is often felt as a simple fact of life, neutral in many ways.  I have, in a very real sense, accepted it.

I had imagined that I would one day be able to say this — in fact it was always a goal — but I expected it to take years.  I even wonder at times if I truly loved her, to have let go of agonizing grief so soon.  The rest of the time, though, I know that it is my love of her and her mother and her siblings — and more importantly, all their love of me — that has allowed this.

When I do grieve anew, it is usually for my other children, who must grow up without the sister they love so dearly.  But as Kat and I have showed them how to grieve, honestly and without shame or fear, now I hope to show them how to come to terms with it and find a kind of peace.

So yes, in my experience, time does heal wounds.  To heal is not to completely restore; I am not who I was and never will be.  That is always true, of course.  Every day makes each of us into someone new.  I changed irrevocably the day I first got married, and again the day I got divorced.  So too the day I married again, and the day Kat and I decided to become parents, and each time a child came into our lives.  And the day a child left us.

Deep wounds can weaken us, may even threaten our lives…and when they heal, scars remain.  This is the form of closure I have always sought: the stitching of a grievous wound, to let the ragged edges grow back together, slowly closing up to knit new tissue.  The mark is there, and will be until I finally die — but a mark is not an impediment to living.  Our scars are a part of us, and to deny them is to deny a piece of ourselves.  I know, because I tried.  For a time, I forgot the face of my daughter.  I remember it now.

Of course I still miss her, and of course some days are not so graceful as all this might sound.  Some days my throat still tightens with grief until my breath grows short.  There are not many such days, though, and fewer as time goes on.  Bit by bit, day by day, the pain eases and the fondness returns.  My memories of Rebecca are tinged more with affection than sorrow.

As she would want, really.  Her six-year-old ego, selfish in its unselfish way, would have wanted me to be sad that she went away; but her six-year-old spark, so bright and merry, would have wanted me to stop crying.  And sometimes, when I do feel the edge of grief’s blade come close, I can hear her say, as she did whenever she wanted my attention and wasn’t getting it, in her affectionately amused, slightly exasperated, wryly matter-of-fact tone: “Daddy, you’re getting distracted.”

And then I smile.

• The Face of My Daughter was published on Monday, December 7th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Rebecca category.
• There have been eight replies.

It was ten years ago today that Jeffrey, Jason and I stood up in front of a little over a hundred people in an oversized classroom space in the upper back corner of The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, PA, and kicked off the very first An Event Apart.

Just the three of us, talking throughout the single day of the event, trading off talks until lunch and then throughout the afternoon.  The slides, most of them running on S5, were projected onto a pull-down Da-Lite screen, and we tapped the screen with our hands to draw attention to bits of design (or code).  In the audience, there was an attendee who’d flown in from Tokyo, just to be there.  Another from London.  We were staggered to think anyone had come more than half an hour’s drive.

It was as lo-fi as it gets without paper megaphones, and we made a whole slew of rookie organizer mistakes — but we got the essentials right, the same essentials we’ve kept alive all these ten years: present in-depth, practical, higher-level content to an audience of savvy web folks, and treat them right.  As we’ve grown over the years from one day to two to three, and from three speakers to twelve (and sometimes eighteen), we’ve kept one central goal in mind: to create a conference we’d gladly pay to attend, every time.  And while I’m admittedly biased, I believe we’ve pretty much succeeded at that goal.

Ten years, which is a lifetime ago and then some, and still rolling strong.  We’re calling it A Decade Apart, because why wouldn’t we?  To celebrate, we’ll be doing some fun stuff at all our events in 2016, special giveaways on top of the usual giveaways, the return of some audience favorites…but I don’t want to give away too much just yet.  Suffice to say, we’re planning on making this our best year ever, and everything’s shaping up to deliver on those plans.

If you’ve been to a past Event Apart, thank you — and if you have a memory to share, I’d really love to hear about it in the comments.  And whether you’ve been or not, I hope to see you in 2016!

• A Decade Apart was published on Saturday, December 5th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart and Personal categories.
• There have been nine replies.

By most measures, I’ve had a pretty damn successful career.  I’m not at “I can retire today” money and nobody’s erecting statues with my visage on them, but only the first of those holds any interest for me, and I’m not expecting it any time soon.  (At current rates of saving and investment return, I should reach that state… right around the traditional age of retirement, actually.)

Of course, I’ve written a bunch of books that earned me some royalties, but books are not a way to become wealthy, unless you’re crazy lucky.  Yes, you have to put in the work to write the book, but in the end, whether your book makes you coffee money or high-end-chrome coffee machine money is down to forces entirely outside your control.  Certainly outside mine.  When I wrote my first CSS book, nobody expected CSS to be more than a slowly dying niche technology.  When I wrote the second, CSS had been declared dead twice over.  When I wrote the third and fourth, it was just starting to revive.

I invested tons of effort and time into understanding CSS, and then to explaining it.  Because I was lucky enough to put that work toward a technology that turned out to be not just successful, but deeply important to the web, the work paid off.  But think of the people who put that same kind of time and effort into understanding and explaining DSSSL.  “Into what, now?” you say.  Exactly.

Similarly, when Jeffrey and I set out to create An Event Apart, there was no assurance that there was a viable market there.  Nearly all the old web conferences had died, and those few that remained were focused on audience very much unlike the one we had in mind.  Luckily for us, the audience existed.  We worked really hard — still work really hard — to find and speak to that audience with the topics and speakers we present, but it would all have come to nothing if not for the sheer luck of having an audience for the kind of show we wanted to create.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been keenly aware of the incredible amount of luck that goes into success, and the awareness only grows as the years pass by.  Just putting in a lot of hard work isn’t enough.  You also have to have the sheer good fortune to have that hard work pay off.  You can sink everything you have, money and soul, into building a place in life, only to have it all sabotaged and swept away by random chance.  You can invest very bit of your life and fortune into an outcome that blind fate renders impossible.

So yes, I worked hard to understand the web, and to explain the web, and to write books and talks, and to create a conference series, and everything else I’ve done over the years — but I was supremely lucky to have that work come to something.  An incredible combination of time and place and interest and birth and a million million other things made that possible.

More to the point, the existence of people interested in what I have to say made that possible.  So I thank you, one and all, for all that and still more.  Thank you for rewarding and redeeming the work I’ve done.  Thank you for being of like mind.  Thank you for your support.  Thank you for listening.  Thank you.

This article was originally published at The Pastry Box Project on 2 December 2015.

• In Gratitude was published on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Tech categories.
• There have been no replies.

Throughout 2015, a few people who’ve seen me present “Designing for Crisis” at An Event Apart have noticed that, on the slides where I have filler text, it’s a localized variant.  In Washington, DC, for example, one section started out:

Andrew ellicott lobortis decima thomas jefferson vulputate dynamicus fiant kingman park sollemnes ford’s theater. Vero videntur modo claritatem possim quis quod est noma howard university consequat diam. Blandit ut claram north michigan park seacula judiciary square william jefferson clinton hawthorne millard fillmore iis…

This was a product of some simple PHP I’d originally written to generate Cleveland-themed filler text a year or so back, which you can find at localipsum.meyerweb.com, and which I’d expanded upon to let me generate text for my presentations at AEA.  The name comes from the original idea I had, which was to provide a list of cities/regions/whatever, so that users could pick one and generate some filler text.  That never quite came together.  I had a semi-working version once, but the UI was horrible and the file management was worse and I got discouraged and rolled back to what you see now.

I kept telling myself that I’d get back to it, do the city-selection thing right, polish it nicely, and then finally release the source.  I’ve told myself that all year, as I manually swapped in city information to generate the filler text for each of my talks.  Now I’ve finally admitted to myself that it isn’t going to happen, so: here’s the source.  I chose a pretty permissive license — BSD-ISC, if I recall correctly — so feel free to make use of it for your own filler text.  I’ll be happy to accept pull requests with improvements, but not package-management or complete MVC restructuring.  Sorry.

I know, it’s a goofy little thing and the code is probably pants, but I kinda like it and figure maybe someone out there will too.  If nothing else, we can look for a few laughs in the output and maybe — just maybe — learn a little something about ourselves along the way.

(P.S. Speaking of “Designing for Crisis”, look for a post about that, and more specifically video of it, in the next few weeks.)

• Local Ipsum was published on Monday, November 23rd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Tools categories.
• There has been one reply.