Content in a Zombie Apocalypse by Karen McGrane—An Event Apart video
Friends, a zombie apocalypse is upon us: an onslaught of new mobile devices, platforms, and screen sizes, hordes of them descending every day. We’re outmatched. There aren’t enough designers and developers to battle every platform. There aren’t enough editors and writers to populate every screen size. Defeating the zombies will require flexibility and stamina—in our content. We’ll have to separate our content from its form, so it can adapt appropriately to different contexts and constraints. We’ll have to change our production workflow so we’re not just shoveling content from one output to another. And we’ll have to enhance our content management tools and interfaces so they’re ready for the future.
In this exciting presentation captured live at An Event Apart Austin, Karen McGrane explains how to survive the coming zombie apocalypse by developing a content strategy that treats all our platforms as equally important.
For more than 15 years Karen McGrane has helped create more usable digital products through the power of user experience design and content strategy. She founded Bond Art + Science in 2006, and has led content strategy and information architecture engagements for The Atlantic, Fast Company, Franklin Templeton, and Hearst.
Karen helped build the User Experience practice at Razorfish, hired as the very first information architect and leaving as the VP and national lead for user experience. There she led major design initiatives for The New York Times, Condé Nast, Disney, and Citibank, and managed a diverse team of information architects, content strategists, and user researchers.
She teaches Design Management in the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which aims to give students the skills they need to run successful projects, teams, and businesses. She is also VP of digital for consulting and venture capital firm Ignite Venture Partners. Her books Content Strategy For Mobile and Going Responsive are published by A Book Apart.
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Chicago Reopens
When An Event Apart Chicago sold out last week, we immediately heard from a bunch of people who were sad because they’d been about to register, and now couldn’t. We hated to shut them out, so we went back to the drawing board, rearranged some things, and managed to free up space for an extra row of seats! We’ve taken care of the folks who got in touch with us, but that leaves us with a few more tickets still available.
So! We’ve opened Chicago back up for sales—but please realize that supplies are very limited, and they’re first-come, first-served. If you were sad to miss your chance to join us in Chicago, grab a seat, because they may not last!
Ten Years, Ten Speakers: Part III
As part of our A Decade Apart celebration—commemorating our first ten years as a design conference—we asked AEA speakers from the past decade what they were doing professionally ten years ago, in 2006. If you missed Parts One or Two, have a look back.
Mat Marquis
I remember 2006 as the year I gave up.
Ten years ago, I worked in a mall—at a cellphone kiosk, shouting at passersby about “RAZR™ phones.” It was my fourth year there. I made a little above minimum wage. I drove to work in a friend’s unregistered, uninsured car, and I slept in it when I didn’t have enough gas money to get me home. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with four other people. We only managed to make rent one month, thanks to one of the roommates appearing on Judge Judy. He was guilty.
2006 was the year I started packing to leave, without knowing where—to start walking south until there was something else. Until there was anything else. Two months of aimless hitchhiking later, “anything else” would start with my first website. First the one, then a handful that would never see the light of day, then an internship “for college credit”—funny story there, too—then my first honest-to-God job with a desk. It wasn’t long after that first website that I stumbled into my first AEA, here in Boston.
There, I found out that there was a whole industry of people like me, who came from whatever background, all of them landing in the same place as I did—all of us making it up as we went along. I made sense there, at my first An Event Apart. I found out that I made sense here, doing this. And right there in the room, I could see the brass ring—I could see that big, terrifying stage, and I wanted to be there. I felt like I could be up there someday, not long after feeling like I couldn’t be anywhere. An Event Apart gave me the kind of goal I was once so sure I could never have.
Years later, it gave me that chance. I’m not sure I’ll ever have the words to express how much that meant to me.
Krystal Higgins
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” That’s a quote from Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, translated from French. It’s often quoted pessimistically, but I like to think of it as an optimistic reminder of the past’s impact on the present.
About ten years ago I was working at my first tech company, just a year out of college, feeling completely out of my depth. After all, I’d always planned to work in narrative animation, and tech was a much different world. My work at the new company involved creating setup wizards. At first, I struggled; what could I possibly know about setup wizards compared to an expert in the field? I assumed my past experience was moot, that I would have to learn to do this new job from scratch. But over time, I realized that designing setup wizards wasn’t too different from weaving a story. True, it’s a user-defined story, and nonlinear…but it’s still a task of taking the new user on a journey, from a beginning to an end. That realization unlocked a lot for me.
A decade later, so much has changed—jobs, friends, family, responsibilities, the ups and the downs. But storytelling and those early experiences with setup wizards have stayed with me, continuing to influence my work with onboarding.
Derek Powazek
Heather and I had just published issue 6 of JPG Magazine, our lovely little printed photography magazine. The theme was “OOPS!” Turns out, it was an appropriate theme for the era. Soon after, I would start a company with a friend to publish JPG and other community-created magazines. We would take money from the wrong people. We would make lot of mistakes, some very public.
Putting myself back in those decade-old shoes now is painful because I know what’s coming. By the end of 2006, it would all fall apart spectacularly. I’d lose JPG, lose the company, lose friends, lose a big chunk of my idealism. That failure sent me on a decade-long startup binge. Sometimes working for others, sometimes starting my own. Venture capital pitch decks and the constant hustle. It made me stubborn. I had to prove that I could make it work.
It took me almost a decade to break out the cycle, but I finally did. Last year, Heather and I left San Francisco. We now live on a 2-acre farm. We grow vegetables and raise chickens and goats. I build things out of wood. I still work for companies than end in dot-com, but I’ve regained some sense of balance. Now, how coworkers treat each other is more important than working on the next big thing. Keeping one hand in the soil and one hand in the digital makes them both better, and it keeps me balanced. It took me a decade, but I finally feel like myself again.
Mark Boulton
I’d just left my job as lead designer at the BBC to go freelance and accidentally form a little design studio. It was a year of feeling out of my depth, feeling like an imposter, and feeling incredibly excited, all in equal measure! It was a steep learning curve to go from the relatively safe walls of the BBC to the big, bad world to make my own living. And with it came a drastic change in tools, working environment, and how I spent my time. Gone were the days where I could spend all day deep-diving into a specific design problem with my head in Photoshop. 2006 was a baptism of fire into the real world of a commercial designer: managing projects, clients, cash flow, and politics.
Jen Simmons
I was working on an unbelievable number of artistic projects, as well as boosting my meager financial situation with some freelance web design. I designed the video projections for an opera about Nikola Tesla that premiered for his 150th birthday in Belgrade, Serbia, and then traveled to the BAM Next Wave Festival that fall; hundreds of tiny clips were triggered by custom software to play through four projectors onto seven screens. I distributed and eventually sold a short film that I’d directed the year before. I produced an ongoing video podcast about yoga and meditation. Took a performance class with Ralph Lemon. Taught classes, as an adjunct professor at Temple University, on Videoblogging and on Web Design Aesthetics.
Amidst all that, I taught myself CSS for layout and Drupal 5. Designed and built sites for an art curator, a university department, a small book publisher, and a non-profit media arts center. Spoke at Vloggercon on how to customize your site by hacking Blogger templates. Ran lighting for a weeklong music festival in the woods. And in December, started filming my next major project.
Basically, it was an insane year, but not a unique one. Most of those years went like that—mixing film, theater, teaching, and the web.
Cindy Li
I was working as a Senior Designer for AOL, working on prototypes, and at one point trying out podcasts. I started the year by working on a blog that wasn’t based on a WordPress template. I met two wonderful designers during SXSWi, Veerle Pieters and Geert Leyseele, who were my tutors for CSS. They helped me not pull all my hair out. After my coworker, Kevin Lawyver, heard about my budding CSS skills, he invited me to be part of the CSS Working Group to help represent AOL and provide a designer’s view.
At the same time, I was making a plan to leave AOL. I had been there for 8 years and had survived about sixteen layoffs. I knew it was time to leave, and I had my sights set on going to San Francisco. I’d always wanted to work on projects that I genuinely cared about—something more than just a paycheck.
But what I learned at AOL was the large role of politics in companies. It’s never just about the design. You have to figure out why some decisions are made against all the evidence and data to the contrary.
Kristina Halvorson
Ten years ago, I had no idea how hard it would be for me in 2016 to remember what I was doing then. However, after referring to my records, it seems that I was running a two-person business called Brain Traffic, working with clients who needed better copy for their websites. My business card said “interactive content strategist,” although trying to explain what that meant was never easy… especially because my own definition kept changing!
I worked at home, had a Hotmail email address, carried a Treo, and owned an 8-pound PC laptop. A few of my career goals were to get a real office, work with a Fortune 100 company, and attend—yes, attend—An Event Apart. I had a two-year-old son and a baby girl on the way. I had not yet opened a Twitter account.
The thing I remember most about 2006, work-wise, is that, while we were insanely busy with great projects, I was never really satisfied with the small amount of time and budget we were given to plan for or design content requirements. Typically, we were handed a document with a list of pages to write, a site map, and some wireframes, and told to get going. I read and re-read books by Gerry McGovern, Steve Krug, Ann Rockley, Jakob Nielsen, and Lou Rosenfeld. I wished constantly that someone would write a book about content strategy for websites so I’d feel like I knew what I was talking about.
Bruce Lawson
Like Rachel Andrew, I’d been invigorated by the @media 2005 conference, where I got to meet many of the people I’d been talking to in blog comments (remember those?) like Patrick Lauke, Gez Lemon, Jeremy Keith, and Joe Clark.
I’d been blogging and writing about web standards since 2003, and was beginning to work on making the Solicitors Regulation Authority website CSS-driven and accessible, after the nested-table hell I’d worked on since 2004. But this community gathering made me realize that there were actually teams of people who cared about such things, and made me want to join such a team, rather than constantly fight to make a website less terrible. So I began looking around for other jobs, which eventually saw me move to Opera, where I am today.
Peter-Paul Koch
Ten years ago I was on top of the browsers. If you asked me, I could run down a list of quirks for Firefox, Safari, and Opera, though a full IE list would have strained my memory capacity. Nowadays it’s impossible to keep track of the differences among all browsers.
Ten years ago I had vaguely heard of the mobile space, and was aware that something called XHTML-MP existed, and that it was a dumbed-down subset of HTML. I also had my first speaking gig: a panel at the iconic @media conference in London. Nowadays I’m holding off on public speaking since most conferences don’t pay a fee, and I get tired of traveling for no good reason. (AEA does pay a speaker fee, by the way, and always has. Yay for them!)
Ten years ago, JavaScript libraries were just getting started. I already had my doubts, and expressed them in that first panel. Although tools can be very useful, they also lead to web developers not understanding browsers any more. And the very definition of a web developer is someone who understands browsers. Here the situation has worsened, if anything: picking and using the cool library/framework of the day takes far too much of our precious mental capacity.
Ten years ago, web development was simpler than it is today. That’s not to say we should pine for the Good Old Days—there’s plenty of excitement that comes with increased complexity—but we should still take care we don’t lose everything that makes the web the web. Simplicity, URLs, reach. That’s the core. The rest is…not exactly window dressing, but the web could survive without it in some form or shape.
Jason Santa Maria
Ten years ago I was hot off the heels of a redesign of A List Apart, just went out on my own to freelance, and starting to do some public speaking. All of these things were a mix of exciting and terrifying. I made lots of mistakes, but did some stuff right, and, most importantly, I learned tons from everything happening all around me. I had immersed myself in web design and the community through lots of blogging and events like SXSW. I made friends and found mentors during that time whom I often turn to now.
Ten Years, Ten Speakers: Part II
As part of our A Decade Apart celebration—commemorating our first ten years as a design conference—we recently asked more of our favorite speakers from the past decade what they were doing professionally ten years ago, in 2006. Here are some more of their answers. If you missed Part I, have a look back.
Richard Rutter
I was a matter of months into the adventure that is Clearleft. We’d already moved into our first office and hired our first couple of employees, but we had no real idea that in ten years we’d be in our own four-story building with nearly thirty people working for us.
At the time we were working a lot for dotcom start-ups, which I seem to recall was great fun, albeit somewhat stressful as everything had to be done on a shoestring budget. Also we were feeling our way in how to combine design work with business and development processes—Agile hadn’t really entered the scene at that point.
Back then I was also blogging far more than now—something I’m trying to get back into. Short, to-the-point posts were a common thing back then, perhaps surpassed by even shorter tweets now, not necessarily in a good way. Looking at my 2006 archive, one post caught my eye in particular: “there’s a different approach to web page layout which is gradually getting some traction. The idea is that the layout is changed to best accommodate the window size.” The rest, as they say, is history.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher
I became a copywriter at a small print-advertising agency. As the team’s resident eagle-eye, and lowest-paid staffer, I was responsible for proofing and copyediting every piece before it went out the door—including the little brochure-ware websites we were increasingly being asked to create. Only, I wasn’t actually proofing websites. I was proofing print-outs of websites, delivered to my desk on large-format paper each day by our traffic manager. And proof them I did: right down to marking up line breaks I didn’t like. I imagine our developer chuckling to himself, adding a few arbitrary <br/>s to the page, hitting print, and then immediately removing them.
Less than a year later, I’d left that gig to become a web writer at another agency—and I haven’t reviewed a printed website since.
Jaimee Newberry
I was a Partner and Director of Interactive at a boutique animation/interactive agency called eatdrink. A lot about what I was doing then, and with whom, makes me smile today. I loved my work and I loved my team, I learned so much about how to, and how not to, work with clients and personalities of all types.
If 2016-Jaimee could go back and share some insight with 2006-Jaimee, I would tell me this: “Speak up! Write and share more about what you’re doing and what you’re learning. You love to write—don’t suppress that. It will be a great tool of growth in the coming years for you and for others. Don’t hide quietly/shyly in the background all the time. Learn out loud.”
Dan Mall
I was busy speaking and writing about how to use Flash and web standards in harmony, as well as helping to open the Philly office of Happy Cog. Great year!
Brad Frost
I was a junior at James Madison University, where I took a Dreamweaver course and a Flash course as part of my Media Arts and Design major. The major was a combination of media studies and hands-on multimedia design training. I dove headfirst into it all, making obnoxious Flash sites and animations. My summer job in 2006 was designing my university’s English department website, which hilariously is still up.
The following year, two weeks before I graduated, our class was visited by two alumni who worked for AOL. They said “if you’re interested in this whole web design thing, you should read this book called Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.” I graduated and sat unemployed in my sister’s apartment reading Jeffrey’s book, realizing everything I’d learned was wrong. And, well, here we are.
Jeremy Keith
I was spending most of my time talking and writing about Ajax. It was the hot buzzword back then and everyone was going ker-razy for Ajax. My concern was with how people were using Ajax. Instead of treating it as an enhancement, I was seeing a lot of sites that made JavaScript and Ajax a prerequisite just for retrieving information. I ended up writing a book called Bulletproof Ajax wherein I described how Ajax and progressive enhancement make a perfect match. I even coined my own terrible buzzword—Hijax.
We don’t talk about Ajax that much these days but we do talk about React, Angular, Ember, and other JavaScript frameworks that are driven by Ajax. Me? I’m still banging on about progressive enhancement. I’ll probably still be banging on about it in another ten years. It’s an approach that has stood the test of time and keeps proving its worth again and again.
Ten years ago I was writing on my blog. Lots of other people were writing on their blogs back then too. That would soon change, though. Twitter and Facebook were picking up steam and soon they’d be luring bloggers away with enticing and seductive short-form convenience. I’ve stubbornly continued writing on my own site. I fully intend to keep on writing there for the next ten years too.
Aarron Walter
I was a college professor and freelance web designer obsessed with microformats, RSS, and PHP. UX wasn’t really a thing at the time—we were still thinking about information architecture (IA). I was building my first web app and making so many mistakes. My PHP was not exactly organized in a tidy MVC structure. It was server-side/client-side soup!
I remember seeing Todd Dominey speak at AEA at Turner Field in Atlanta that year. I was blown away by his candid explanation of how he built SlideShow Pro into a company. Nine years later, he joined my team at MailChimp. Life’s a funny circle.
Jonathan Snook
2006 was a transitional time for me. I had recently started freelancing and had my first taste of going to a web conference: SXSW Interactive. It was such a great experience to be able to meet people that I had only previously connected with online through forums and blogs. It connected me with a book publisher, which led me to write books. It also connected me with the conference organizers, which led me to start speaking. Those connections are ones I still cherish, and I am grateful for the opportunity to make new connections with people every day.
Veerle Pieters
I was running Duoh!, my design studio, just as I do now. Only, I believe 2006 was a turning point for me. Exciting times were about to come. My blog was becoming rather popular. I attended my first SXSWi conference, where I spoke on a panel and met most of my internet friends in real life for the first time. That was double excitement for sure.
In terms of workflow and tools I can’t say things have drastically changed for me, but that’s probably due to the fact that I’m mostly focused on pure design work and less on coding. I’m still using pretty much the same software tools for designing. Some things are just done more efficiently due to the development of the software. Other things are harder and take way more work such as designing a fully responsive site.
Kevin M. Hoffman
I was the director of electronic communications for a prestigious art and design college in Baltimore. I had a staff of one awesome person, and together we built big and small websites as needed. I remember an image optimization tool being indispensable, but I can’t remember its name for the life of me. I also deeply loved my “blackbook,” which was the black MacBook Pro at the time.
I had no idea what the next ten years would hold, but I certainly didn’t expect to be speaking at a conference as prestigious as An Event Apart. I remember attending it when I could afford it, going all the way back to AEA Atlanta at Turner Field in 2006.
Oh wait, our awesome ten-year-old son was born in 2006! Whoops, I probably should have led with that one.
Building a Remote Work Culture: An Interview with Jaimee Newberry
Jaimee Newberry is a designer, consultant, coach, speaker, writer, and all-around awesome person. She contributed to the broadcast of the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, helped lead mobile strategy and design for Zappos, and was Director of User Experience for Black Pixel. We recently talked with Jaimee about podcasts, tiny challenges, her new book, and her talk for the upcoming AEA DC and AEA Orlando: Special Edition.
It’s been two years since we did one of these. What have you been up to in the meantime?
Yes! I think we did this in late 2014. I’m excited to share a few of the most recent things.
The Unprofessional podcast wrapped in 2014. But this year co-host Daniel Steinberg and I knocked out Season 1 of the “tinychallenges” podcast. It’s also been quite an honor to be a guest on a handful of shows including Release Notes, Debug, and iOhYes.
In terms of professional coaching, I’ve coached more than 40 individuals and teams with culture, process refinement, career path/development, collaboration, and communication. This has been some of the most fulfilling work of my life, and I’m still going!
But the biggest and possibly freshest news is that in February 2016 I accepted a role as Chief Operations Officer for the premiere iOS+Mac+Android dev and training company, MartianCraft. We’re a 100% remote team—we are honored to serve some of the largest and sharpest teams in the world! I love this team and I’m excited to be a part of such an incredible company.
What sold you on joining MartianCraft, and what are you most looking forward to doing there?
Joining MartianCraft was not only about the ability to continue working 100% remotely from my home, and the understanding that I’m an independent mother with two young girls. It wasn’t only the amazing, talented, and kind individuals who work here, or the offer to accept a role that feels like, “Finally, at last, it fits!”
What sealed the deal for me was that working with MartianCraft never once made me feel my gender. I’ve worked in a lot of environments that felt like a “boys’ club.” But from our first conversation about the potential to work together, to agreeing to come aboard full time in the capacity of COO, at MartianCraft I’ve simply felt like an empowered human being. I’ve felt listened to and clearly understood, rather than dismissed or placed in a glass case. I’ve felt elevated, rather than shelved. I’ve felt supported and encouraged.
I’m most looking forward to strengthening, and sharing externally the amazing stuff this team does internally—from experimenting in our MartianCraft Labs, to refining the process of what it means to work and collaborate remotely, internally as a team, and with our clients. Kinks in remote culture definitely come up, and we actively work them out. We’ve got a lot of information to share!
I’ve been experimenting with quite a few other things, as well. I started an experimental YouTube vlog, I’ve been writing a good amount of Medium posts and #coffeewithjaimee sketches, while also trying/testing new apps, hanging out with my kids, and most recently putting some focus back on my physical health.
All this experimenting resulted in starting something more officially called #tinychallenges. The idea is to break things down really small, like two minutes or less per day, in order get out of our own way and DO MORE. Experiment, learn, mess up, try again. Put stuff out into the world. Every day is an opportunity to push ourselves and grow, even if only in the tiniest of ways. Over time, these #tinychallenges add up to life-changing things.
Tell us more about #tinychallenges!
I started experimenting my way through 2013 with small, random challenges after a severe case of burnout triggered by the loss of my dad in 2012. Eventually, I committed to doing a random monthly challenge for every month that had 31 days in it. Because of the momentum and fun, it quickly grew into something I did every single month. Every new month, a new challenge. I was never very consistent with how I tagged these projects in the early days. Sometimes it was #31days, #30days, sometimes #randomadventures; it varied depending on what I was doing.
My friend Brad Heintz, upon joining me for a one-month challenge, suggested unifying the name to something easier to follow and join. We landed on the name: “tinychallenges.”
Our Slack community continues to grow, a related podcast was born as well, and I’ve been invited to share my story all around the world, about how I used tinychallenges to eradicate excuses and build-up to writing the first draft of my first book, which is currently with an editor, and will hopefully be ready to share with the world by 2017! It’s my favorite talk to give!
A book? Congratulations! What’s the title and topic?
Thank you! I’m super excited! It’s called, They Call it a Comeback: The Essential Guide to Surviving Life Burnout. It’s the book my primary audience has been asking me for, for a couple years. I’ll reserve further details until the book announcement, hopefully this fall.
You have a talk in DC and Orlando called “The Art of the Sell.” What will attendees take away from it?
My goal is that designers and developers will take away some really practical skills that will tighten up the way they talk about their work, and how they communicate in their day-to-day interactions. In our line of work, we have to be salespeople. We sell our ideas internally to our teams and managers. We sell our work to prospective and existing clients. Selling is in every fiber of our work as designers and developers.
In the past, selling was a skill I fumbled through by wearing a lot of different hats over the past 18 years—from production artist to Chief Operations Officer and everything in-between. I did it wrong a lot. And, while I’m constantly realizing how much more there is to learn, I’m excited to share what I’ve learned so far. I believe my information will make life a bit more blissful for designers and developers in regard to the fine art of working with other human beings.
What has you most excited these days?
Three things that cover a broad range of my day-to-day activities, outside of being a mom:
- Helping teams/individuals with culture, process refinement, collaboration, and communication.
- Hammering out the sticky points in remote-employee culture through experimentation. I love this work and I’m honored that I get to do it not only with my team at MartianCraft, but that we get to help other incredible teams through coaching and training, as well.
- Finishing my first book.
Congratulations again on the book, Jaimee—we can’t wait to read it!
Jaimee Newberry will present “The Art of the Sell” as part of An Event Apart DC and An Event Apart Orlando: Special Edition, to be held at Disney’s Contemporary Resort October 3-5, 2016. Don’t miss your chance to see this enlightening session and many others—register today!
Laziness in the Time of Responsive Design by Ethan Marcotte—An Event Apart video
As screens and input types evolve, we’re managing more complexity in our designs than ever before: our layouts are becoming more flexible and responsive; our interfaces, more immersive. Maybe we can look for simpler approaches?
In this unique presentation captured live at An Event Apart Austin, Ethan Marcotte (creator of responsive web design and author, Responsive Web Design and Responsive Design: Patterns and Principles) walks us through some seemingly complex (what else?) responsive designs, and shows us how we might do a whole lot more with a little bit less.
Ethan Marcotte is a designer/developer who is passionate about beautiful design, elegant code, and the intersection of the two. He cofounded Editorially, and over the years his clientele has included People Magazine, New York Magazine, the Sundance Film Festival, and The Boston Globe.
Enjoy all the free videos in An Event Apart’s library. And for your free monthly guide to all things web, design, and developer-y, subscribe to The AEA Digest. Subscribers get exclusive access to our latest videos weeks before anyone else!
Meeting Expectations: An Interview With Kevin M. Hoffman
Kevin M. Hoffman has been a designer for more than 15 years now, and in that time worked on small libraries, the University of Baltimore, Nintendo, MTV, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We caught him between meetings to share a few thoughts about his favorite tool, conversational interfaces, and meeting design.
How’d you get your start in design, and on the web, if the two are different?
My first taste of both web and design work was in graduate school during the mid-1990s. I helped build a tool that allowed community organizations to perform property database searches. It helped them identify delinquent property owners in economically challenged areas. It was a trial by fire, as it was for most people building websites in those days. You just designed and built the thing! And then checked that thing in Mosaic and Netscape 2.
Processes for working together have become a lot more formalized since then, and mostly for the better. However, I do believe that a little bit of that “wild west attitude” has a place in our work.
You design meetings. Meetings are a thing you can design? How so?
You can definitely design meetings, and just about anything else. To design a thing means two checkboxes are checked: you’ve determined a desired outcome, and there is consideration for how people actually use or experience the thing. Painful meetings often fail on one of those two fronts.
Meetings often happen out of habit rather than intention, which fails the first checkbox. Typically, there’s not a clear, shared understanding of a specific outcome for each meeting, other than “be more further along than where we were when we started.” How do you measure that? How do you prove it? You can’t do either, really.
In terms of consideration of users, meetings can treat “meeting users,” or attendees, horribly. We don’t fully engage the brain, and fall back on listening as a primary method of accomplishing a goal. It’s as if a website only expected you to read body copy, with no thought to headings or visual ways of communicating ideas. The user experience of reading lines and lines of copy is mentally exhausting. The user experience of sitting in conversational meetings can be exhausting for the same reason.
You’re giving a talk called “The Five Meetings” this year at AEA. It’s clearly about meetings, but what will people take away from it?
Two things. First of all, I hope people come away with the belief no one is powerless to change the kinds of meetings they have in their organization. Not everyone is in a position where they can call, or even lead, a meeting, but everyone has a shared responsibility for the quality of that time together. There are simple things you can do—structures to fall back on, conversational hacks, and ways of changing the lens on a topic—to improve them.
Second, that even though some of us follow a prescribed set of meetings, either by process—agile, waterfall, or making it up—or by culture—conservative large company, startup, or one-person shop—we all share a lot more struggles, project to project, than we realize. I’m looking forward to hearing everyone talk to each other about all the meetings and meeting challenges they have in common, and being a part of that conversation. That’s where the best insights happen: the conversations after a talk!
What are some tools, tricks, and/or techniques you can’t work without?
Any tool that is designed for groups to use together, rather than individuals to use alone. Current examples include Google Docs, Slack, Dropbox, Github, and a tool I’m working on with some really smart friends called Boardthing. I absolutely cannot work without a place to draw what I’m thinking. I also can’t work without breaks, and lots of them!
What has you most excited these days?
I’m super excited about conversational interface systems. In the technology space, I really think Apple has its work cut out for it when you look at Siri’s performance compared to Google Now or Amazon Echo, in terms of making people’s lives easier. I do think Siri does well in specific situations, such as Homekit or the Apple TV, but general-purpose use isn’t quite as smooth as Android, in my experience. Conversational interfaces can certainly be awkward at first, and honestly feel a little like science fiction to an organization that isn’t designing for them yet. But using tools like IBM’s Watson API, it’s not really that hard for anyone to build that kind of logic into websites and applications.
Kevin will present “The Five Meetings” at An Event Apart Washington DC, July 25-27, 2016 . Don’t miss out on this essential information—plus eleven other great presentations for people who create digital experiences.
Understandable Design: An Interview with Stephanie Hay
Stephanie (Steph) Hay is an Ohioan who loves video games, CrossFit, and BBC programs. She’s also a journalist who pioneered content-first design and Lean Content testing, two low-risk methods for proving traction before building a product. Stephanie co-founded FastCustomer and Work Design Magazine, and made 1nicething.com. These days she’s in Virginia at Capital One, where she leads Content Strategy and runs “What’s Up Thursday,” a weekly share-out for the entire design team of 250 people across 11 locations. We caught up with Stephanie to discuss work/life balance, human-centered design, and following the fun.
How’d you get your start in design, and on the web, if the two are different?
It’s around 2004, and I’m working at George Mason University. A guy by the name of Will Rees, one of my best friends to this day, is teaching me to use Contribute. I write a sentence, publish it, and POOF it’s on the web. I edit the sentence, re-publish, POOF it’s updated. I’m hooked instantly with the speed. Especially because, while in grad school, I found myself having to re-pack hundreds of alumni letters into envelopes because the Dean edited a few lines after the first round had already been printed and packed. NEVER WOULD I GO BACK TO PRINT AGAIN! Or at least that’s what went through my brain at the time.
What can you tell us about working at Capital One and sharing knowledge across a geographically far-flung set of teams?
The amount of customer feedback and data at our fingertips is incredible. The design talent is amazing. And the willingness to share with and learn from one another is astounding. I often describe Capital One as a startup at scale; we’ve got ridiculously smart and excited people who want to change the world like NOW, and we have the ability to learn quickly from millions of customers who interact with us every day across multiple touch points. The biggest challenge to sharing knowledge isn’t our geography; it’s WHAT to share and WITH WHOM, because there’s so much good stuff happening by default, and so many people to learn from. That said, we have a weekly design team session called What’s Up Thursday, where designers share things that are inspiring them or lessons they’re learning. We try to make it an oasis during the busy work week; a chance to slow down and get in our local rooms and on video conference together, see each others’ faces, meet new team members, tell some jokes, and truly stay connected with our design colleagues.
You’re giving a talk called “Designing for Understanding” this year at AEA. What’s it about, and what will people take away from it?
The session title has a dual meaning. The first is externally oriented: Are we focused on seeing our customers understand, meaning the users will KNOW what’s happening without having to think or interpret our work? If so, we instantly boost the quality bar. We set new expectations of what’s possible and rise above the noise of STUFF. This goal of designing for understanding slips away if we get too myopic about usability—does it work, and to what degree—or about consistency—is it the same user experience across touch points?
The second is internally oriented: Does our design teach us what customers are feeling and thinking? If so, we get better at communicating with each other about what needs to change or improve, and why. If not, then we can find ourselves redesigning iteratively in a shot-in-the-dark kind of way; one where our assumptions or opinions are driving changes rather than customer needs and behaviors.
People will take away stories that illustrate both meanings, plus a key mindset + methods for making it work at work.
What are some tools, tricks, and/or techniques you can’t work without?
I can’t work without balance. I find balance in things like going to the gym, pulling weeds around the house, playing Animal Crossing, getting in driveway conversations with neighbors, eating Pho with my husband, and watching Game of Thrones or Miyazaki films. Very similar genres, no? And naps. Also, I can’t work without a good joke to start a conference call. Not every time, but enough. A mentor once told me, “follow the fun,” and that’s been a pretty good motto to live by whenever humanly possible, both at work and at home.
What has you most excited these days?
My team. I have SUCH kind, creative, inventive, and hilarious people on my team at Capital One. They inspire me and make me cry with joy and pride, then tease me for being such a softie—but sheesh, I can’t help it. My team includes 15 folks at all stages of their careers, focused on different kinds of content design and storytelling or events management. And to know we’re part of a larger design organization driven by hard-but-rewarding human-centered work… and that our work connects with millions of people every day… and we still have so many opportunities to connect even more. Yep, that’s pretty danged exciting.
Stephanie will present “Designing for Understanding” at An Event Apart Chicago, August 29-31. Don’t miss out on this essential information—plus eleven other great presentations for people who create digital experiences.
Meaning in Motion: An Interview with Val Head
Val Head is a designer and web animation consultant with a talent for getting designers and developers alike excited about the power of animation. She’s also the author of The CSS Animations Pocket Guide, and the forthcoming Meaningful Motion, published by Rosenfeld Media. We caught up with the busy designer, developer, educator, and consultant to find out which juicy bits of web goodness most inspire her creatively—and what makes for a great animation experience on the web.
How’d you get your start in design, and on the web?
Neither design nor the web were ever things I thought I’d be doing as a career. I started getting into design in university when my band needed flyers and artwork made. Design was never a thing I gave much thought to before then, but the more I had to design, the more I liked it.
Soon after that, the band needed a web presence and I had to learn how to do all that design stuff on the web. Thankfully, I had some friends who knew web development and were willing to tell me all about how the web worked over drinks after shows. Something about the web really stuck with me, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
What are some tools, tricks, and/or techniques you can’t work without?
These days I’m finding tools like CodePen and both Chrome’s and Firefox’s animation inspection tools invaluable for designing quick web animation prototypes. Using CodePen and the browser tools together lets me work quickly and see exactly what’s happening visually, which saves so much time.
Sketch has become a bigger part of my workflow lately, too. That’s one I put off using for a while, but it just finally clicked with me during a recent project, and now I really like it.
What would you say is the most overlooked aspect of web design?
The people part of the web often gets overlooked. Sometimes we’re so distracted by the latest framework or trend that we forget that we’re making things for people in the end. Designing a thing that works for the audience it’s intended for is more important than what tools we use to build it, but that sometimes gets lost.
What has you most excited these days?
So many things! But the biggest thing I’m excited about right now is my upcoming book, Meaningful Motion. We’re finishing up the last few edits and details, and then it will be published by Rosenfeld Media this summer. It’s my first full-length book and the writing process has been quite an adventure. After spending the last few months so focused on writing, I’m really excited to be able to share it with everyone soon!
You’re giving a talk called “Designing Meaningful Animation” this year at
AEA. It’s clearly about animation, but what will people take away from it?
It is about animation! That’s a big theme for me right now. More specifically, the talk is about looking at animation as a design tool and communicating meaningfully with it. Just like type or color, animation has something to say within your designs.
In the talk, I walk through an example of how you can use a few key classic animation principles to match animation to the rest of your design. Then, looking at the bigger picture, I discuss some techniques for choreographing all your interface animations to work together as a whole, plus ways to document these design decisions in your style guide to save time in the future. It’s all about treating animation as part of a design system.
Val will bring “Designing Meaningful Animation” to An Event Apart Washington DC, July 25-27; An Event Apart Chicago, August 29-31; and An Event Apart Orlando: Special Edition, October 3-5. Don’t miss out on this essential information—plus eleven other great presentations for people who create digital experiences.
The Contributions of Others: A Session with Jeremy Keith
You may know Jeremy Keith from such books as DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax, and HTML5 For Web Designers (now in its second edition). He’s a cofounder of the splendid design agency Clearleft, where he makes websites, a bouzouki player in the band Salter Cane, founder of the world’s first Science Hack Day, and maintains numerous other creative and scientific outlets and communities. Between activities, Jeremy graciously agreed to talk with us about the Irish music community site The Session (which he created and maintains), his passion for the web (because it’s other people!), and his new AEA presentation on the telegraph, the space elevator, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
You’ve been at this for quite a while. How and when did you get your start in web design?
Y’know, in retrospect, it’s like I was killing time waiting for the web to come along. After I dropped out of Art College in the early ‘90s, I was busking and hitching my way around Europe, eventually settling in Germany’s Black Forest region. I was playing in a band there—a precursor to today’s Salter Cane. We decided we should have one of those new-fangled websites that was all the rage. I said I’d look into making one. So, thanks to the generosity of all the people sharing their knowledge on the web, I was able to learn everything I needed about nested tables and font tags.
Anyway, the band’s website turned out okay. Then other people in other bands started asking me to make websites for them. They even offered payment. Payment! I had a day job selling bread in a bakery but after a while I was able to pack that in and do the web thing full time as a freelancer.
When the new millennium came around, it was time to bid farewell to Germany. I packed my bags and lit out for Brighton on England’s south coast. I’m still there today.
Tell us a little bit about The Session.
I’m really into Irish traditional music. The funny thing is, I only got into trad music after leaving Ireland. It’s the typical Irish-in-exile story: constantly going on about the homeland, but not, y’know, actually living there.
So it was while I was living in Germany and discovering the web that I was also immersing myself in Irish music. I knew I wanted to combine the two things somehow and create some kind of website that had something to do with the music.
What I settled on was a tune-a-week affair, where I would publish a different jig or reel each week and write a few words about the tune. It worked really well and started attracting quite a following. The problem was that I only knew a finite amount of tunes. When I started running out of tunes, I overhauled the site to be more a community affair, where anyone could publish a tune. I also added the ability to submit events and discussions.
That was back in 2001, when I was still dealing with Netscape 4.
The site grew and grew thanks to the generous contributions of all the members. I was very proud of The Session…but over time, I was also somewhat ashamed. Its design and technical infrastructure were badly in need of an overhaul.
Finally, just a few years ago, the site finally got the overhaul it needed. It’s looking and working a whole lot better these days.
I really like the perspective of working on such a long-term project. I’m immensely proud of the site although, as I said, it’s all down to the contributions of other people. Kind of like the web itself.
What are some tools, tricks, and/or techniques you can’t work without?
I try not to get too attached to specific tools or tricks. Today’s best practice is tomorrow’s anti-pattern. You get all set up with Photoshop, Sublime Text, and Grunt only to find out that they’ve been replaced by Sketch, Atom, and Gulp. Don’t get me started on JavaScript libraries!
Instead of focusing on particular tools or trends, I find it more useful to get acquainted with design principles, color theory, contrast, typography—and when it comes to web development, progressive enhancement is a principle that has stood me in very good stead over the years.
The three tools I really can’t work without are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript…and even that’s a bit of a stretch because I don’t always need JavaScript.
What would you say is the most overlooked aspect of web design?
Weirdly, I think the “web” part of web design is the most overlooked. For as long as I can remember, designers and developers have been trying to find reasons to avoid the inherent flexibility and uncertainty of the web and instead try to shoehorn it into pre-existing design processes. At first it was print design, now it’s software development. The thinking is always based on assumptions: “Let’s assume that everyone is using a desktop computer…” or “Let’s assume everyone has a device capable of running the latest JavaScript…”
I’ve found that on the web, it’s best to assume nothing. That might sound like a scary prospect, but it’s actually quite liberating. Giving up on “pixel-perfect” control doesn’t mean giving up on quality. Quite the opposite: it means treating the web for what it is, not what we wish it were.
What has you most excited these days?
I know I said I wasn’t pushed about specific tools and techniques, but I’m pretty excited by Service Workers. It’s really not the technology itself, but what it enables that excites me. We can start to design for situations where the network isn’t available. That’s something that’s previously been out of bounds for web design. It feels like it could be as big a game-changer as Ajax or responsive design.
Also: plastics.
You’re giving a talk called “Resilience” this year at AEA. What’s it all about, and what will people take away from it?
It will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that I’ll be talking about progressive enhancement, my eternal hobby-horse. But I’m trying something different: I’m not going to use the phrase “progressive enhancement” at all during the talk. I think some people are put off by that phrase, or perhaps have a misunderstanding of what it entails. Instead I want to focus on the benefits of approaching the web with a progressive enhancement mindset, namely that it leads to a more robust and resilient end product.
Instead of taking the straightforward route, I’m going to take a ramble through the history of communication networks from the telegraph to the internet. It won’t be all about the past though. I’ll have some things in there that are currently in the realm of science fiction. Yes, I’m talking about the space elevator. I can’t resist an opportunity to geek out about the space elevator.
Oh, and there’ll be some talk about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in there, too.
I’m hoping that people will come away with an appreciation for the broader perspective of our work. The web is a truly amazing collective creation. It’s a privilege for all of us to work on making it a little bit better each and every day.
Jeremy will bring “Resilience: Building a Robust Web That Lasts” to An Event Apart Boston, May 16-18; An Event Apart Chicago, August 29-31; and other shows throughout 2016. Don’t miss out on this essential information—plus eleven other great presentations for people who create digital experiences.