Magic Torch

I’m okay at working through a bit of analysis on my own. Just me, a pen, a sheet of paper and a problem (or solution) that needs looking at. Although sometimes the bit of paper is in the way and I’ll end up writing fluff down. But I can do alright, I think.

However. Replace the bit of paper with another person, focused on the problem (or solution) at hand and something else entirely happens.

This isn’t really meeting territory. If “brain-storming” wasn’t such a bullshit term these days I’d maybe try and use that. It implies the kind of mental fireworks that can occur. Actually, I think I’ll use it. Brain-Storming with liked-mind people. Talking to them and listening to them. Ideas just sleet into your head from places unknown.

Is this really obvious? Probably.

Well, it always freaks me out every time it happens. I end up grinning a lot. People probably think I’m weird, but this is the reason why.

Freaks me out. Every. Time.

Google’s foray in the social networking space, Buzz, has got a bit of kicking in the last couple of days, because of the assumptions it made about how people use email. It’s a bit weird, really, that some wunderkind at Google didn’t spot the potential for trouble before Buzz was rolled out, no consultation period required, or so they thought, at the beginning of last week.

The basic line of thinking seems to have been:

“We need some way to hit the social network ground running. People aren’t going to fancy importing or adding friends to a whole new social web app. Luckily people already have lots of friends in their email address books so let’s save everyone a load of time and just make an instant list of followers and followees from everyone’s contact lists. And make all these lists visible to everyone by default, because these networks are all about showing off anyway. And then throw in their photos and RSS feed subscriptions as well for a dollop of extra stuff. Instant Facebook-levels of content and social networking will ensue and our appreciative users won’t have had to lift a finger. Victory will be ours.”

The car-crash then ensued when this insanely naive view of what email is for (Social networking, but in an old-fashioned, clunky way. Errr… that’s it, isn’t it?) ran full-pelt into the real world, where email is a medium not a genre and used for a million more important, secret, dangerous and intimate things than Facebook or Twitter could dream of.

How do you not spot the problem here? What kind of self-obsessed corporate culture produces the kind of clearly very talented engineers who have no understanding of the real-world uses of a technology they control so much of?

Is it now just about beating the other guys? Are we back to there again? That seems to have been the driving factor here. There wasn’t the customary Google opt-in beta period. It was just there, all of a sudden. Because it was good for you. Because Google is cleverer than you are and they know what is good for you. Even if your life crashs as a result. And, actually, don’t worry if that happens. Google has backups.

It turns out you don’t need to be a genius to be evil. You just need to be really, really stupid.

One reason occurred to me earlier this week as I was looking at 37signals’ new Answers advice/tips/forum app. As with the rest of the 37signals repertoire, it does what it needs to do and not a lot else. The tag filtering is particularly nice: could be more complex (“Choose multiple tags at once?”), but isn’t (“Nope”). Focus power, Daniel-san!

So the thought that occurred to me is this: When things are simple, it very quickly becomes obvious whether they are any good or not. If you’ve built something that does only one thing and it’s a clunker, there’s nowhere to hide. This is pretty terrifying to most people, I think. It’s easier to pile on the functionality and try and convince your users that Quantity returns better value for their money or attention than Quality does.

It’s easier to do because Quantity merely requires that you have time, while Quality requires that you have skill.

“Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

So said Jeff Goldblum, wisest of all Jeffs (with the possible exception of Zeldman) to safari suit-crazed boffin Richard Attenborough in cinema’s “Jurassic Park”.

Jeff knew what he was talking about, too. We all remember the thing with Samuel L. Jackson’s arm, don’t we?

Jeff’s profundity with regard to meddling in Nature’s Ways has been on my mind for a couple of weeks now. But instead of DNA, I’ve been humming and hawing about jQuery.

jQuery has become our go-to JavaScript framework foundation for the scripting we do here at Equator. And we do a fair amount. Nothing like a Google Docs or anything, but we can bring it when required. And it’s great to have jQuery for the heavy lifting. However…

Back to Jeff.

While Dickie was spluttering into his Chilean Sea Bass, Jeff followed up with some extra ‘blum-zen:

“I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it.”

Are you beginning to see the connection?

Yeah, okay, we’re talking a JavaScript library here, and not Velociraptors in your kitchen, but I think Jeff would recognise what is going on.

jQuery requires very little discipline to produce startling effects. And while that is great for deadlines, I can’t help thinking that proper design thought is being short-circuited a bit. At least with one particular jQuery-enabled bit of magic: the Show/Hide widget, whereby clicking a button shows or hides a bit of content via a smooth half-secondish transition.

It’s very nice. Much less jarring than instantly disappearing or appearing the content and it looks snazzy (there’s a lot to be said for a bit of snazzy). With traditional JavaScript you’d be looking at a fair bit of work to realise it. With jQuery it literally takes a few minutes. There is a one function call (slideToggle) in jQuery that automatically controls the animation in either direction.

What was once expensive is now essentially free. And so it starts getting used all over the place. It’s seductive as hell. Section of content getting a bit big? Stick a show/hide on it. Too many sections making the page a bit long? Stick show/hides on all of them. FAQ page? Do you really need to ask?

I’m beginning to think this is a real problem. I think we have become a bit too enamoured and let clients become far too enamoured of this little warlock’s trick we can do just-like-that.

Hiding things that are sort of in the way or don’t quite fit isn’t any kind of substitute for showing the correct things in the first place. It’s too easy, if the page is proving tricky to get right, to just hide the rough edges.

There’s also a hint of “we know what’s best for you with regard to this inter-net page” about it. If people consume the content in this particular way they will be fitter, healthier, more productive, etc.

It has reached an absurd degree in some particular cases I’ve seen recently (naming no names). Where there seems to be an actual fear of showing the user too much content. And by too much I’m not talking about one of the chunkier Harry Potters. I’m talking about anything that might force its way beneath the page fold (these still exist, apparently). Four or five hundred pixels’ worth of nicely-set copy.

So you end up with FAQ pages where every section and every question/answer within that section is subject to a show/hide widget. Even if the answer is two sentences. Even if the answer is shorter than the question. Seriously.

Why is scrolling such a nightmarish proposition, but clicking one of half a dozen or more non-standard controls to display content that may only be relevant once revealed is the future of the human-computer interface? Just because you’d like your user to grok your UI the way Lobot might, it isn’t going to make it so.

People had been navigating newspapers, magazines, books, parchments and… errrr… scrolls for thousands of years before the Internet turned up, but somehow putting it on a screen means that more than a couple of paragraphs and people are going to be jumping out of windows?

Really?

Come on. What would Jeff do?

The project is approaching some kind of conclusion. 85% seems like a decent number. For it. Certainly not for the theoretical site that is still sitting amongst the pages of the various bits of project documentation. That has been replaced with something crunchier, trickier and yet more nutritious. 85% sounds decent and reassuring.

Things are still a bit rough round the edges, but also coming together. It starts feeling like a site, despite the placeholder content and the same image on 147 of the pages. The cracks are starting to close up. At least the ones I’m deciding to notice.

Unfortunately 85% means what’s left is all that stuff that I’ve forgotten about or overlooked or ignored. The unknown bits and pieces that’ll only start making noises once the site gets properly used by actual admins and users.

Bloody 15%.

Oh well.

I find the fact that the web is barely more than a dozen years old mind-bogglingly exciting. So much to figure out, try out, fail and succeed at. An extremely addictive mix of abstract concepting and carving logic and method directly out of plain-text. At least where I live in the process. It’s great. You get a real sense of putting the tracks down in front of you as you are barreling along.

At least when everyone involved gets it.

When they don’t, the newness and comparative strangeness of the medium (at least when compared to anything else, ever) doesn’t give you much of a foundation from which to mount a forceful and authoritative argument about how things need to work. Particularly when counter-arguments are being mounted from things like printed paper. Everyone groks paper, or at least they’ll have a good go at kidding themselves they do. It’s safe, barring the occasional cut. It doesn’t do much at all, except lie there and be looked at. Stupid, but comprehensible because of it. And it isn’t the only one. Film and video is possible more stupid.

The web, by comparison, isn’t stupid. It isn’t stupid in about a thousand different directions at once. And that makes it very hard to define. Maybe even impossible to define in terms that’ll line it up nicely with the old media.

I can kind of see why the way the world operates being taken over by this thing that no-one seems to fully understand, and which in 5-10 years is probably going to be unrecognisable, can be scary. And why the people hawking it might be intimidating and make you push things back to places you understand.

I can kind of see that. I can be sympathetic. Honest.

Most days.

Not today, though.

Today was full of people literally waving paper with comfortable and stupid things written on it. Things like “consistent brand colour” and “look at this, then look at this, now stop”.

But today is done. Next?

John Gruber has an seriously exhaustive UI critique of the Safari 4 Beta over at Daring Fireball. I agree with most of it. I’ve recently moved back to using Safari as my main Mac browser after about 6 months of Firefox (I was in a forensic mood and Firebug kicks the Safari web inspector’s ass for hot code-perusing action).

But, Safari (3, at least) just feels part of the OS in a way Firefox doesn’t, and I was getting enough Firebug action at work so back I went.

But the nice feelings have pretty much evaporated with version 4. Mac UI conventions have been abandoned left, right and centre, and I’m having to exert substantial mental effort just to re-orientate myself with the bloody thing every time I use it.

Here’s one thing. A tiny, little thing that is driving me nuts.

I, like most people, love my browser tabs. I don’t go crazy, but I generally have 3 or 4 open at a minimum. With version 4, Safari has combined the tabs with the normally sacrosanct window toolbar. Many of the reasons why this is knob-headed are detailed over at the Fireball, but my one tiny thing is this:

When I click to switch tabs I clearly make some kind of a minute downward motion with the mouse. Previously this had no effect on the window as a whole. But now about 50% of the time, because tab and toolbar are one, the window gets dragged down a few pixels instead of the tab being switched.

I like my windows right up against the menu bar. Just how much is becoming clear to me, because I am starting to make strange moaning noises when the 3 pixel drag occurs.

UI anxiety is a laughably crap thing to have, so please stop giving it to me, Safari 4.

UPDATE: I gave in and changed the tabs back to the v3 configuration using the hidden preferences. The downside to this is that Safari no longer asks you the “Close multiple tabs?” question if you click the “close window” button. One thing replaces another.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Looks like the “Close multiple tabs?” warning does appear, after all. Must have unchecked the option at some point. Huzzah!

I headed back to A List Apart this afternoon to have another look at the examples from that Fluid Grids article. Except the URL got mucked up somehow and I ended up at the ALA 404 error page. Most of the 404s I’ve seen pull you straight out of the front-end of site and into the back-end code. Error, buzz, beep, string of unintelligible characters if you are really lucky. But not in this case.

Something has gone wrong but what you get are a couple of reasons why you are maybe where you are, a reassurance that this isn’t just some unnoticed hole in the site and a couple of sensible exit strategies. And an illustration. An error page watercolour.

It’s great. Not too serious, but also not dismissive. It’s matter of fact and doesn’t dead-end you. Most of all it sounds authentic. Written by someone to explain the real, human situation you are in (surprised and a bit lost), not the contents of a variable chucked onto the page by a bit of code. No “Error. This page does not exist.” bollocks.

After seeing this and experiencing it in the wild, I can’t see why you would do it any other way. A little thought about where the user is, and the best language to engage them, and… hours later, I’m possibly more impressed with the site for failing so well than anything else (the Fluid Grids article does rock, though).

Bit of house-keeping as this is my first post.

I’m Jamie. I’m a front-end web developer at Equator in Glasgow. I’m part of small-ish team that is devoted to producing the best-coded front-end web interfaces known to humanity (nothing wrong with aiming high, after all) and helping to understand the frankly weird and esoteric world of web user experience.

Right now I’m thinking about the evolving understanding of just what it is that people do with the web and what the web does with people. My general feeling is that assumptions based on other types of media aren’t going to get us very far. The curve is getting steeper, the strange, chaotic, emergent nature of the interwebs is ramping up. Best to hang on tight, because the human brain really hasn’t had anything to compare to this. It’s the future, after all.

But thinking about that kind of thing all day doesn’t really lead to much in the way of practical creation, except maybe for a small puddle of dribble, threatening to short-circuit your keyboard when you run out of metaphors. So I also like to think about (or wrestle with) the nitty-gritty.

Forms, for one thing. I have a bit of a love/hate thing going on with them. Nothing nittier or grittier than wrangling form elements across 5 or 6 different browsers. I’m sure they’ll crop up here fairly regularly.

Also the fact that web pages can be brittle if you hold on too tight to their design. One second they’re gleaming, aligned collages of design perfection, then a word count creeps too high or a typeface causes a funny reaction and, crunch, bones snap, limbs flail wildly and the whole thing just goes… off.

That antagonises me so much. If there is perfection to be found on the web, it certainly isn’t in the interactions of bits of software. So don’t bother looking for it there.

Anyway. That’s a fair amount of fluff to start with. Hopefully things will get a bit more comprehensible and useful as we go along.

So. What’s next?