This is The Web Ahead, a weekly conversation about changing technologies and the future of the web. I'm your host Jen Simmons and this is episode 100. I want to say thanks to our sponsors today, Squarespace and Code School. I also want to say thanks to Pantheon for powering the The Web Ahead website. And CacheFly for delivering all of the audio files that you are listening to. The fastest, most reliable CDN in the business.
Episode 100! Very exciting. Kind of a meaningless, yet monumental number. To do something special, I thought I would have someone on the show today who has not been on the show yet. It seems weird that I've been doing this for three and a half years without having this guest on. Here he is today: Jeffrey Zeldman. Hi, Jeffrey Zeldman.
Eric Meyer calls me the grandfather. Everybody else calls me the godfather. Thank you, Eric. [Jen laughs] I kid because I care.
I've been called The King of Web Standards by Forbes. The Godfather of Web Standards by me, secretly, with hand puppets. And The Godfather of Web Design, which is even more ridiculous. I'll take it because...
Let's back up. There was no other way to do web design except with invisible pixel divs, spacer GIFs, setter tags, and table layouts. Because browsers didn't support standards. There were no standards for the web, period.
There was a W3C after a little while, started by Tim Berners-Lee. They had these recommendations. They got the big browser company at the time, Netscape. Later, when Microsoft got into the business, they got Microsoft. And they got other companies sitting at the table. These eggheads would propose, "Hmm, it might be nice to have a visual layout language." As we all know, Håkon Lie and Bert Bos proposed CSS.
But the browser companies had no reason to implement those standards — they were competing on features. Netscape made up its own tags. In the very beginning of the web, that wasn't a bad thing. There weren't enough tags. Tim Berners-Lee conceived the web as document sharing, and was very agnostic about how things looked. That was cool, and that is still what the web is. But there began to be commercial applications for the web almost immediately, as soon as the Netscape browser came out. Netscape said, "We don't have a way to get pictures in here. So we're going to make an <img> tag." Tim Berners-Lee was like, "I'm working on something. I might call it <object>." He gave the egghead reasons why it might be <object> and they were like, "Great. By the way, our browser now supports <img>." They made up their own tags. Later, Microsoft kind of did the same thing.
Around 1998 — before a lot of listeners were born — some friends and I had been designing websites for three years. We saw that it was all broken. I had to do IE3, IE4, Netscape 3 and Netscape 4 versions of a site. At the time, the two browsers were coming into equity. Not equity in features, but they were both equally popular. Lots of stuff was going on that was shifting the balance away from Netscape toward Microsoft. Some of it was political, some of it was criminal.
Anyway, there were basically two phases of web standards. In the first phase, my friends and I got together and made the Web Standards Project. It seemed like the best name — we could make WaSP out of it. A wasp is a little creature but you don't want to get it mad. That's how we felt about individual developers: powerless compared to the big companies, but if you get enough designers and developers pissed off — if you step in a wasp's nest — it's going to suck.
We had a character called The Wasp that wrote these editorials. The Word from the WaSP. At first we were pretty aggressive. Originally, Glenn Davis was the chair of the group. For whatever reason, he had to step down. George Alston did it for awhile. Then he stepped down. I designed the site and helped write the copy. There were lots of other people involved. People who knew a lot more about technology and the web than I did, because I was self-taught and I was just making it up as I went along.
The first phase was getting the browser makers to support web standards. That was a struggle and it took some going. I think you've had Tantek on the show?
Tantek created the IE5 for Mac browser, which was the most standards-compliant browser at the time. People said a lot of stuff about Opera. I don't want to get into that. In terms of supporting CSS, IE5 was way ahead of its time. He came up with a new standards-compliant rendering engine.
There was the first phase, and then the other browser makers were shamed into it. The first thing was really for us, our group, calling the stuff "standards," and insisting that other people call them that, even though the W3C didn't call them that. When you name something, it gives you power over it. It's the Peacekeeper Missile. You know what I mean?
Yeah. And let's not have the web go the way of VHS and Betamax. Three, five years into the web, let's not have it get fragmented. Let's have the web content be accessible to all. Let's keep doing design and behavior and advancing, but let's do it in a way that all browsers support.
The first phase, from 1998 to 2000-2001, was really that. Around 2000-2001, the browsers were good enough at CSS. In 1998, we were using CSS for type size, to prove that it could be done. But still doing it in the context of a table layout. There was no choice if you wanted margins and gutters. Once the compliance set in, the strange thing was, nobody was using it. There was the same tiny, avant-garde group of design and development nerds. Because they believed in accessibility or because they were coders by nature — whatever it was — they were writing semantic markup and using CSS. But 99% of the industry was not doing that.
The next phase was to get designers on board. That was really hard. I think the two things that did that were my 2003 book, Designing with Web Standards, and CSS Zen Garden by David Shea in 2004.
In my book, I was talking about making type bigger for people who needed it. They could push a button. There was lots of abstraction of layout. But I didn't figure out the persuasive piece of making the design really cool. I was trying to do good design, but I didn't figure out what Dave figured out: give people the same content, and have them design any way. Not necessarily a usable web layout. Maybe creatures under the ground reading the copy, or a strange and tranquil garden. People were very crazy. Designers who thought Flash was the only way to design suddenly went, "Oh, now I get it. This stuff is cool."
There's a whole new generation that has grown up with CSS for layout. That's just how you do things. Unless they had to design HTML emails, they haven't done table layouts at all. But the idea that HTML needs to be semantic and accessible — that your site should work even if JavaScript fails or a script doesn't load from a remote server — they still don't get that.
Even today, there's this really super-talented group of new people coming through code schools and these wonderful new organizations that are training people. They can do amazing stuff with HTML technologies. But they don't necessarily know about progressive enhancement. Those things near and dear to you and me.
Your book, Designing with Web Standards, is so well-written. You're an amazing writer. That was my beginning. I had struggled. I had built some websites and really struggled with how to make it work in multiple browsers. I didn't have a community of people to work with or talk to. I was isolated, me and maybe one friend [who was into technology]. I thought it was me. I'd work on this stuff, write this code, and it didn't work the way the book said it would work. I struggled, struggled, and struggled. I thought, "I'm just not smart enough," or, "I can't figure this out."
I was sick of it. It was annoying beyond belief. I thought, "Eh, maybe I won't do this anymore." Then I read your book, and I was like, "Oh! It's not me!" [Laughs] This way we've been doing this — with browsers that aren't compatible, and making the HTML do the design with tables — is a really bad idea. It is very laborious and dumb. I should use the technique from this guy. I don't know who this guy is, with his blue hat on the cover. But whatever he's saying, I like this. I should do this.
Yes.
I describe my experience because I think it was an incredibly common experience. I think this is what happened for a lot of people. A lot of things clicked. A new technique was presented that seemed very doable, and much better than what we had been doing before. It was presented in a way that was easy to understand and made a lot of sense. It made me excited about the web all over again.
Do you want to know the 30 best websites with parallax scrolling? Or the 20 or 50 best parallax scrolling websites?
I think we're in an amazing place. A few things have happened. I think Luke Wroblewski putting together the phrase mobile-first. People have made variations on it, like content-first. Basically, it's designing around the content. Presenting the content, getting out of the user's way. That's huge. I think five years ago, web designers mostly would get a brief and go into Photoshop and make something pretty. Even really smart web designers; I did that. Not that I'm saying I'm really smart. Wow. [Jen laughs] I'm drinking less coffee, so I'm going to be less articulate and probably more honest.
I think user experience has come to the fore. Research has come to the fore. Not every person in this business, but a lot of people in this industry, when they get an assignment, they say, "Great, I'd like to meet some users. I'd like to spend time learning around the client's product." You don't just jump into Photoshop. You do research. Even if the client says, "Nobody uses mobile," most people in our business say, "It's really up to the user how they're going to access the content." If the client says, "I've got a mobile site." I will shame somebody. It's NY1. Do you know who they are?
They do Bronx and Brooklyn. NY1 covers all five boroughs, but I don't know if Time Warner Cable has access to all the boroughs. That's a whole crazy... the cable industry is like a country run by warlords. [Jen laughs]
I was in a car for four hours yesterday on a 45 minute drive because of treacherous ice and snow. Nobody was clearing the highways and it was terrible. My daughter got home really late and she was like, "I haven't seen you, dad. I hope there's no school tomorrow after all this." I said, "I hope so, too."
We got up in the morning and the streets were clear. They didn't clear them during the treacherous snow, they cleared them after. I looked on the New York Times and it said nothing about school closing. I subscribe to a mobile notification that lets me know if there's an amber alert, if an old person goes missing. It tells me all kinds of emergency information, but mainly I get it so I'll know if the school closes. None of that had been activated. I was pretty sure school was open, and in fact, it was. I thought, "NY1 will be good for this." I went on my phone to look at NY1's website. [Laughs] They had updated it, in that everything was in Helvetica now. They updated the fonts and put some white space in it. But it still wasn't responsive. In fact, it doesn't even fill the full screen of a small iPhone. They leave extra room. My friend Tim Murtaugh, who I work with, said he thinks they probably put in a breakpoint. It's squishy but it's not responsive. He thinks they probably put in a breakpoint so it looks good on the boss' iPad. I think that's probably correct. But if you look at it on your phone and can't read it, it pushes an ad for you to get the app.
So they know you've just come to read their content. They know you're on mobile. They know they've created a website you can't use on mobile even though it would be the simplest thing in the world to put in some responsive breakpoints and rejigger the layout. Instead, they want you to download their crappy, two star rated app. I love apps, but I'm not going to do that. If something is a public news vehicle on the web, why would I?
There's a lot of that nonsense still, everywhere. There are a lot of people who know better and want to do a good job but their boss won't let them. I do think there's a lot of people doing research, people reading about UX, a lot of pattern libraries. Which I don't think of as something that you slavishly copy. I think of it as something you learn from. You can go, "Hmm." Again, thinking about Luke Wroblewski. The hamburger menu on its own isn't as helpful as the hamburger menu with the word "menu" next to it. You learn from things like that. I think there's a lot of exploring. I think responsive has been huge. Thinking about adaptive content — all of that stuff is great. Clean, big type layouts. A few years ago I said, it seems like we're designing responsive books now. At first with responsive, we weren't thinking about type.
People are focusing on bandwidth and giving themselves bandwidth budgets. If we want to use the italic version of that web font, what can we cut? Can we cut this image? Thinking about bandwidth again, thinking about users on networks that we just don't know. There's no reliable way to know their screen size and things like that. All of that stuff is great. There's tremendous professionalism. But I also think it's gotten hard as hell. And complicated as hell. If I were a web designer starting now, I don't know that I'd even get into it. The way I learned in 1995, I got a book on HTML. I think it was Jen...
It was a DOS word processor. You typed commands. I would be like, "Italic. I type the i command." I learned it in about five minutes, because it was just mapping one really dumb, anti-user skill pattern into another. [Jen laughs] It was like, "HTML? It will work just like WordStar." That was great. That's all I had to know. I learned table layouts from Lynda Weinman and David Siegel. I made up some stuff and it was great. It was easy.
The hardest thing was around the turn of the millennium, transitioning from table layouts to CSS. CSS still feels a little intuitive to me, in a way that I think it doesn't to people who started designing websites after 2000. Once browsers supported CSS, and CSS Zen Garden and my book were out there and people got it, I think it was relatively easy.
But now it's so complicated and there's so much we can do. Sometimes I feel like web designers fall into this pit of, "I'm going to design something because I can. I'm going to lazy load everything and pop up all of the photos in their own popups." Sometimes it's like, wouldn't it be ok to just provide a URL? Wouldn't it be ok if I clicked this link and it leads to another linked webpage? Does it really have to open in its own box, kind of blocking the background of the thing I was just reading? Me having no way to be sure that I bookmarked it?
During the days of Flash, I remember people hijacking the scrollbar to make it look more branded. Redoing it in Flash. Hijacking the type and not using the user's fonts, but using a weird little pixel font. There were lots of problems with that approach.
You could make it orange. If you were using IE, IE had given into a client that said, "Our website's brown and we want a brown scrollbar." So you could do it in a browser.
I do feel it's tempting right now to do light boxes and parallax and carousels. Nothing is wrong with any of these things, in and of themselves. We can get really dogmatic. The people who do things well, who care about best practices, can snicker and go, "Carousels! Ha ha! Who uses carousels?" It's like, "Yeah, you did, six months ago. Now you scoff. You were really proud of that. That was a beautiful carousel, man." We're experimenting, which is great. There's a tension right now between making a newspaper — it's responsive, the type is big and there are very few distractions — and the kind of crap we still see on the link bait sites.
You're reading something on Huffington Post. Maybe it's a political article. Below it says, "You won't believe what this celebrity did with plastic surgery," and I'm like, "I'll hate myself in the morning but I've got to see it." I click, and the only thing I can compare it to is porn. You're deliberately trapped in these anti-patterns. They've got these windows open that are hard to shut. You have to click 17 times to get to the page you really want. The whole time you're trying to click to that page, they're distracting you with other pages.
Right, the ad overlays on top of the timer, on top of the carousel.
When you're a designer and you have a new project or a new feature, and you're on a deadline — which is always — and a limited budget — which is most of the time — it seems easy to say, "What am I going to do for this? Let me open up 10 of my favorite websites, see how they solved this problem. I'll just copy them. I'll borrow something from four of them and mash it together so it's not a complete steal." It's like, "Look at this carousel and this parallax website and this hero graphic and this single column down the middle. This is what responsive means to me." Put so much focus on the form and making assumptions about what the form should be and copying the coolest, latest, newest thing. It feels like a normal stage to go through, as a designer, when you're not sure what else to do. But that's not how great design gets made.
That's a huge, huge, question. I think great content. I think a look and feel that reflects that content. It makes people feel personal to it.
I'm a diehard Flickr user. I'm in an alpha group, so I'm looking at Flickr's new design that hasn't come out yet. It's amazing. It just makes me pictures feel elevated. There was the old Flickr, where my pictures were small, but I understood how all the features worked. There had been several versions. Recently, they started making pictures much bigger. There was a hybrid design that was a cross between something like Tumblr and something like Flickr had been. I think where they're going with the new design... I feel bad talking about it, because not everybody can see it.
I think Twitter. Most people use Twitter on the web. You and I and most people we know use apps. We use Twitter's app. But their base goes to their website every day. I think changes that have been made to their website have been really good. They make it feel more personal. My profile feels personal and has a few really delightful features, like the way the header reshapes itself for different sizes and a slight bouncy parallax effect on the avatar when you scroll up and down. Little bits of CSS animation and motion. Basically, this is an app. This is a multi-column app. It's the ugliest, stupidest newspaper in the world. It's a newspaper written by idiots with 140 character articles. That's Twitter, in a way. [Jen laughs] Right? It's a curated newspaper written by idiots. But. For me, the new design gives me a sense that it's my website. I don't mean the way MySpace did. They don't let you customize it into a horror. They do let you customize it enough that it feels personal. Yet, it feels better than what you would have done, because most people using it are not designers.
Design is always constraint, it's always purpose. If design doesn't serve a purpose, it's art. I love art but it's not the same as design. Design has to reflect the content and make it easy to create that content. If it's a social site where people create their own content, make it easy to digest that content. If it's the New York Times or A List Apart or a content site, make an accommodation for ads or whatever pays for it. Without having that take over and destroy the experience.
I've seen travel sites that interrupt you trying to get a ticket with ads for a different destination. Because they make money that way. I'm like, "Are you trying to expedite what I need to do so I'll come back and use your site again? Or are you trying to make a quick buck on me? A quick eight cents because you made me look at a Jamaica ad while I'm booking a flight to Boston?" (Now I feel bad about going to Boston when I could be going to Jamaica. No offense, Bostonians. But it's winter.)
Yeah. They're constantly interrupting the experience. They try so hard so get you to come to their site. They don't want their content flying out. They don't want you to read their content wherever you happen to choose to read it — in your RSS reader or repurposed on someone else's site. They really want you to read it on their site, where their ads are running. Yet, they interrupt it with ads for other content or going to someone else's site, because they're making money that way. Everyone's scrambling to figure out the money.
I think we know what makes great design — it's readable. Not just legible, but it invites reading. If it's a site about written content; a newspaper, magazine, website. If it's got art direction, an illustration, or something going on. I don't mean if you've written a listicle — 12 Great Ways To Do X In Social Media. Then you get a stock photo of a cookie or a flower or someone eating a salad, and feel like your job is done. I mean, there's something. With A List Apart, we work with illustrators. There's some consideration to how the thing feels and how the feeling of the site — the way type is on the page, the way articles link to each other — that affects how I feel about what I'm reading.
When I was writing Designing with Web Standards, I had to write it in the font I wanted to use when the book was printed. Which was… it was a Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans font, which means it's an Emigre font… but it's not Mrs Eaves… It's one of the less well-known [remembering] — Filosofia! I actually had to write my whole book in Filosofia. I had to come as close as possible to writing in the layout that the reader would see. I can't use a CMS that doesn't have a live preview. If I don't know how that page is going to lay out, I can't just write. I can't take a client's content and lay it out. I have to know.
In a way, like with print, the perfect marriage — whether subtle or not subtle — is of type and content, and of layout and content. My cousin gave me this amazing architecture book from a university press. I love architecture. This is a history of New York buildings. That's totally stuff I love, and I've never read it. I can't read it. Because the type is laid out so poorly. I'm not being fancy. I'm not like, "You see, I'm a designer, and I care about these things." I don't mean that. I mean, literally, my eyes keep getting lost. I start to scan the page and I lose track of where I am. Because it's laid out that poorly. How can something about architecture be so poorly constructed and designed?
[Laughs] One of the things I see with new buildings, is that the architect is working so hard to be fancy, or to put emphasis on their work — "Look at me, look at my design, look at the innovation that I created, look at the form. Look at the form of architecture. Look at the way I've evolved architecture." The building itself is not very functional. Or the building doesn't hold up. This started happening in the 50s — those buildings didn't hold up to weather. Because the materials that were used were not practical. The metal rusted. The fancy roof that was flat and had a big, pointy corner that supposed to be so awesome, leaks like crazy because the water doesn't run off like a traditional roof. The roof is not actually doing the job of a roof.
There's something so pretentious in that. It's always bothered me and drives me crazy. Perhaps there's something similar on the web. There's a way in which we get so caught up in a fancy new something-or-other, or the form of it. We get away from focusing on what you're talking about being the most important thing. What is the content of this website? What is the purpose of this website? What are users coming to this website to do? How can we deliver that experience to them? Do it in a way that looks amazing and beautiful, sure. But the aesthetics of the layout and functionality should serve that master of delivering the article, the interface for buying the airline ticket, or whatever.
You're talking about designing a website like Mies van der Rohe or Louis Sullivan would have designed a website: around function. Rather than like Renzo Piano. Like the designer had this amazing concept that seems impossible to build and built it anyway. Whether it works well for its use remains to be seen. I actually think Renzo Piano is great at that, but I'm not sure I want to live in a building Frank Gehry designed. They look amazing. His City of Wine Complex in northern Spain, which looks like a giant, crumpled up tin building. Except the curves are beautiful, it's not as random as that.
Mies van der Rohe said, "Form follows function." I think that's true for the web. You can certainly make something that calls attention to itself and is gorgeous. That's not necessarily a misstep. It depends what the site is for. I think if Facebook called attention to itself, nobody would be using it. It has to be super functional.
I do think there's a tremendous amount of room for innovation. That's what this whole show is about. I feel like I'm constantly pushing everybody to innovate and re-think what you're doing and take more time to do something amazing. Rather than defaulting to the way that it's always been done.
Let's ask the question of, "What is the function? How can we not default to a 2003 blog layout for the 150th time, because we aren't thinking about it?" But come up with a layout that serves the content better than a blog layout could possible serve that content.
It really depends what you're doing. We have to redesign Happy Cog soon. I would love that to be gorgeous — drop dead gorgeous. Don't even look at Happy Cog right now. We're getting clients and it's doing its job. There's nothing wrong with it, but everyone at Happy Cog wants to make something wonderful and subtly amazing. Not "look at me, look at me, look at me." Something that will appeal to clients but other practitioners will go, "Oh, that's clever, what they did."
Ten years ago, we had a version of the site that used a sentence as navigation on the homepage. Apparently other people had done that, too. We weren't copying them, we just came up with it independently. It was a nice idea. There was an idea and a point of view.
It's harder to stake out territory like that now. There's so much work out there now. If you were a filmmaker and Charlie Chaplin's time — not to take anything away, Chaplin's a total genius — but when Chaplin invented a form of storytelling, or the guy made that horrible Birth of a Nation... what was his name? He invented intercutting and based it on Dickens. Charles Dickens was the first novelist to tell simultaneously, "What's happening to little Nell?" and back, "What's Fagin doing?" I'm mixing two stories, but you get the idea.
They're huge. You look at something like House of Cards... dropping 13 episodes, streaming — the filmmakers count on the fact that viewers are watching them in order, and have seen every single minute. They expect the viewer to be smarter and paying even more attention. They can drop even more subtle hints, and say even less.
D. W. Griffith is the name.
What you just alluded to as an innovation — and I totally agree that it is — it wasn't a filmmaking innovation. It's not like they put the camera down the actor's throat and filmed from the outside. It was a business innovation.
First, when HBO said, "The Sopranos is so good, we're going to put it out on DVD." Suddenly, even though you'd only seen three episodes on TV, you would mainline that show. I went for years without getting HBO. I just waited for the DVDs to come out for the Sopranos. Then just mainlined that shit. Totally addictive.
I think Netflix understood that, because they were originally a DVD loaning service. When they became a streaming service, they were like, "People are really watching these old TV shows and all of this content we didn't create."
The other huge innovation they did was, they made compelling drama but they used data to design that drama. They knew that Kevin Spacey was popular with their subscribers. They knew people liked him as a villain. They knew how much on-screen sex activity their viewers wanted in a Kevin Spacey vehicle. Not too much, not very much, not explicit. But a little. And it should feel dark and menacing. They knew that from the Kevin Spacey movies that were popular and they knew where people would stop watching. They knew where people would quit watching in the middle. They bought a story that someone else created — House of Cards was a British show — but they changed it radically to be a perfect Kevin Spacey vehicle, with all of the things that they knew about what their users like. Like a Scorsese or the Sopranos but driven by data about what the users want. Which is very different. There is their innovation. Not only do they dump at 13 episodes at once, knowing people will mainline it. It even effects their Twitter feed. When Frank says something on Twitter, he has to address every episode, because they don't know where people are in the watching experience. He has to do it in a way that doesn't spoil an episode I haven't seen yet. It's really pretty intriguing.
I think all of those things are business innovations, as much as creative innovations. Don't you?
I was like, "Wait, what? Data, what?" I just pulled up a New York Times article about this.
This is a huge innovation. It's more like web design, to get back to our topic.
In web design, we take our best shot at what we think it going to work for the user. Then we scrape our data and go, "Hm, for some reason, no one is hitting that button. We really want them to." Or we pivot and say, "Nobody cares about that button." The same way Twitter evolved as a side project. Maybe a websites starts out as a serious business magazine but people are only clicking on the feminist articles, then we pivot and it becomes a feminist magazine. Just to pull something out of the sky.
They're now doing storytelling — fiction writing, which is supposed to be escapist, but is also supposed to be inspirational and help us connect with our biggest fears and secret desires. Hitchcock would have loved it. Because he wanted to play the audience like an instrument. He wanted to terrify people and make them laugh and make them scream. He fantasized about it. It was like he wanted to have sex with everyone in the audience. Sex of a certain kind. Not mutual. He wanted to be in charge. I think these storytellers are now doing that. They're doing what web designers do, when we're lucky. Go back three months after we made the site and look at how people are actually using it and change the design.
Some architects are now doing it. Where they go back and look at the building and change it. Obviously they can't knock 10 floors off, but they can...
Wow.
So where do you think web design is doing?
I think good web design is figuring out ways to get the right content to the right people when they want it most. To make it readable. I think web content is not just surface design anymore. It's not just design of websites looked at in a browser on a desktop, obviously. But it's not just small screens. I don't want to sound like a convergence idiot, but, "How does this effect my toaster? How does this effect my FitBit?" Not just the part of the experience where the user sits at their desk and logs into fitbit.com. Not just the part of the experience where the user uses the FitBit app. What's the experience of using FitBit? How is that going to work? How do I recharge it? It seems like there's a chance for a lot of stuff to get connected up. Wearables. I don't mean to be stupid about it, or go too far in a sci-fi direction.
Five years ago, we started figuring out that the endpoint was not just a 1024x768 screen on someone's desk, on the fastest computer, with a direct connection to the internet that they could afford. We're learning that it's not just a mobile device, or a smartphone in an American's pocket on a fast network. We're designing for high-end and low-end. We're figuring out how to make our content usable to someone who might be accessing it in rural India. Where the electricity is only a few hours a day and fuel-based. They burn gasoline to create electricity, to create radio towers. We're also designing stuff that someone with a super fancy phone and two wearable devices on their body, is going to interact with.
It's a very, very exciting time to be a designer. I think since the web. Some people would say since the computer revolutionized type setting. That's definitely true — that made it really exciting. But that was still designing the same stuff, only faster. If you were designing a print ad or a book, you didn't just draw stuff and hope the typesetter did what you said. You could control the means of production. That was huge and exciting. But I think it's much more exciting now. We have this global network that's not only wired all over the world, but wireless all over the world. Different nodes are aware of each other.
Last night, my daughter and I were coming home from Connecticut in the back of an Uber [cab]. The Uber app was constantly recalculating. It was a terrible snowstorm and the car was sliding around. It was a really scary ride. The Uber app, somehow, in the midst of that insanity, was constantly calculating how many minutes until we'd be home. Based on how fast we were going at that moment, weather conditions, weather reports, what it knew about the driver. It was crazy. When I was calling my daughter on the way there, she said, "Dad, you said you'd be here in 14 minutes and now you're saying 16 minutes. Shouldn't it be 12?" I'd say, "Because it's constantly adjusting its estimate." And I showed her how when we got together. That's amazing.
There's a tremendous computational power. Our minds are just beginning to comprehend how to put it together. As web designer, it's very exciting. We're not just tangental to that, but we're an important component of that. We're not just sharing documents anymore. We're really connecting deep into people's lives. Assuming they opt in and it's positive — I don't mean in some weird, creepy, NSA way — although, there's probably some really talented web developers at NSA right now, figuring out all kinds of stuff, too.
I would like to see us all not necessary just jump on a bandwagon of, "This is awesome! It's cool! It's new! It's robots! The science fiction of my childhood come true!"
I'd like to see us have a bit more of a critical eye and say, "This could end up being tremendous and amazing. This could end up being really bad." The technology itself is agnostic. It's up to us to make decisions about how we will and won't use it. It's up to each one of us to make decisions about what job are you going to take or not take. What clients do you want, what do you not want to do.
When you have a project, how do you want to help shape it? So that it ends up being a great company where you can get a ride, and not a pile of jerks like Uber doing things that are really awful — both to the drivers and for the people using the service.
I think we have a lot of agency to help make those decisions. Sadly, I don't feel like we're doing a great job yet, [as an industry], having a more critical [thoughtful] conversation.
IWhat the NSA has done is truly frightening. I want there to be great art, great TV shows — because they're great writers. This idea that Netflix is scraping the data and shaping the drama to fit the data...
I was at career day at my kid's school last Friday. I was talking about whatever it is that I do. One of the other parents was an advertising person, a media person, but she started explaining to the kids... it's at an NDA level. Not only do they know what you're watching and when you stop watching, but they also know what you ate that day and what you shopped. They know the device in your pocket. They can do experiments where they can make you try a new cereal by placing it at a certain place on a grocery store shelf at the store that you go to after you've watched something that they've planted in a TV show. Maybe as something that the characters were eating, and they didn't even call it an advertisement.
I think there's a tremendous responsibility now, for designers to make decisions.
Do you remember Debbie Downer, the skit on Saturday Night Live?
I think we assume that all of these systems are working independently. "My credit cards have gotten so much better. Look, I can use an Apple Watch or a Google device and play with my phone and it's so much easier. It's so much more convenient. Look at this, completely separately, over here, I've got something going on over there, I've got something going on."
What we don't know [or acknowledge], and what you just described from this parent, and I was watching Citizen Four last night, the reality is that these things are rapidly getting connected. Everything you Google [search] is matched up with everyplace you've been. Because your phone knows where you've been. It's matched up with everything you've bought. That information about you is being sold to these big corporations, and they're shaping everything that they're doing. Which cereal to make, what television show to create, how the script is going to go, how much sex is going to be in this TV show.
Which is why I've switched to DuckDuckGo. I'm trading some of that convenience. When I use Google on my phone, it knows more about me, so it can tailor the results more. DuckDuckGo preserves my anonymity. I'm trading off. I'll search another eight seconds if I have to. It's a terrific search engine, don't get me wrong. They know as much as Google, in and of itself would know, if Google didn't also have Google Wallet and know everything that I bought at Amazon, and everything else. If Google didn't know all of that about me, DuckDuckGo is every bit the equal, in terms of delivering web content that I'm searching for. Photos that I'm looking for. "What's the name of that guy?" or "What's that article that I read five years ago?" Either of those services will do it just as well. But with Google, somehow, the next time I go to Amazon, I'll see a book that I want. That won't happen with DuckDuckGo. That's ok. I'm making that much of a tradeoff.
My studio here, I call it A Space Apart. Happy Cog, Monkey Do, and Font Bureau are here. We used to have a company called Bean that was really smart and really ahead of its time. They made an app that let you decide how much information you were willing to let advertisers know as you use the web. There were financial or other gains that you could get. They were saying, "This is the world we live in. They know everything. You should be in charge of that. You, the smart consumer, should be in charge of that. They ended up pivoting and becoming and educational app. They found that people aren't ready for that conversation yet. For an app that could let me decide how much Google knew about me, the public wasn't ready. The public is almost happy not knowing.
I do. I was planning on buying one. Again, it's an experiment. I want to understand this technology. I want to know what it is.
I [also] think we should have some deep conversations about this and try to figure out how much of this we want and like. How much of this is really handing over everything about what it means to be a human? To corporations who want to make decisions about the world, our lives, our environment, our stores… everything that's being offered to us for sale.
I think there's something about size and the balance of power. There's a quote that I tweeted earlier today: "To what end may consumer convenience be subverting democratic freedoms? Is data collecting a threat to democracy?" ([That's from] a conversation happening here in New York today.)
There's an idea here about balancing power. It's not necessarily that these things are bad all by themselves. It's the way in which the balance of power can get completely out of whack. Individual people and humans aren't able to have a democracy or have lives or have culture anymore. The culture is being completely subsumed by these very large institutional interests — that are bigger than the people who are part of it.
You're one web designer on a project. The project is much bigger than you. You can only have so much control over it.
I like not doing fly out menus. I would not do fly out menus when they were popular. I wouldn't let me clients have them. I had some really bad times where the client insisted and I just said, "No. No. It's bad. It's not accessible. It's bad for the user. No. Let's figure out your information architecture instead. Let's make it easy to find stuff."
That gets back to— you've got to resist if you want to do it well. You have to resist something the client or your boss desires for the wrong reasons. Research and data, as scary as it is when misused, can be used to bring back the errant boss. I can say, "I'm an old guy, and I agree with you, Henry. I agree that these colors are terrible for old guys like us. But the kids like it. Let's look at the data. The kids really like that purple and orange, so let's go with it." You can use data to defend the design. That was a mindlessly stupid example of doing that. I use stupid examples because they help make the point.
I'm sure there are people all around the world listening to this show and they all have very different political ideas from each other, and from me. I do encourage all of us to be brave and make conscious decisions and not just fall into habits. You don't want to fall into a habit of using Bootstrap because you don't know what else to do. You don't want to fall into a habit of saying 'yes' to everything that's going on around you. Whether that's a fly out menu or some incredibly invasive code that you're going to put on the website.
Thank you for being on the show today.
Well, thank you for your kind words. People can check out the show notes for this show with a whole bunch of links: thewebahead.net/100.
Comments are open! I have opened comments. Despite trends going the other direction.
People are welcome to leave comments. Especially for all of that stuff at the end — all of that depressing stuff. You can disagree. Feel free to disagree. But you've got to be nice. You can be strong, but you can't be rude.
You can follow the show on Twitter, @thewebahead. And people can follow you on Twitter.