almost daniel.

[ SXSW Bios ] #odogrids

• @khoi

Brief

Everyone’s using grids, and grid tools and frameworks are everywhere. But do you truly understand the ins and outs of this powerful design principle, and how it’s changing along with new media and platforms? Chances are most digital designers have only a cursory knowledge of the grid’s concepts and best practices, overlooking the tremendous value that truly smart grid usage brings. In this expansive sequel to his famous 2006 SXSWi talk “Grids Are Good,” designer and grid expert Khoi Vinh (NYTimes.com, Subtraction.com) will give a bracing tour of the many ideas packed into his new book “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design.” This solo talk will span the history of grids, take a brass-tacks tour of best practices, and look ahead at some of the most enlightening and innovative thinking that’s shaping grid thinking in the future. Continue Reading »

[ SXSW Bios ] #sxcss

• @mollydotcom
• @fantasai
• @tabatkins
• @davidbaron
• @sgalineau

Brief

In this session, representatives from major browser vendors including Chrome, Microsoft, Opera and the W3C will pull back the curtain revealing some of the challenges with implementation and interoperability. The goal is to have designers and developers get a glimpse into how CSS has struggled and finally gained its footing as the presentation layer in everything we do for the Web. Continue Reading »

[ SXSW Bios ] #stopling

• @trammell
• @boltron

Brief

A common assumption among startup entrepreneurs is that listening to potential customers is the best way to find out whether your product or idea will succeed in the market. Honestly — don’t bother. In our ten years of user experience research for startups and big companies alike, one thing we’ve seen time and again is that it’s behavior, not opinions, that tells you whether people want to use your product. The main problem with opinions is self-reporting bias: Opinions are often inconsistent with behaviors or other attitudes, especially when discussing hypotheticals. Remember  Clippy, the little character that appeared in Microsoft Word years ago? That little bastard arose, in part, from Microsoft asking users if they wanted help working on their documents — everyone said, “Sure, sounds great.” But once people started actually using it in the real world, they hated it — it might be one of the most hated features in the history of computing. But Microsoft employs hundreds of researchers. So where did they go wrong, and how can you avoid making the same mistake? It’s simple. Never ask people what they think of your product or idea. Instead, I’ll walk you through the world of researching people, including what you need to ignore customers effectively, just like Apple and 37 Signals. I’ll go over examples from our research with Volkswagen, Electronic Arts, and Wikipedia, and show how to use remote research to construct behavioral scenarios and eliminate poor research. Continue Reading »

Panel [SXSW Bios] #notmyjob, #notmyjob2

• @halvorson
• @james_mathewson
• @evany
• @nathanacurtis
• @lwelchman

Brief

OK. So let’s say your business has a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a blog (or lots of blogs), an email newsletter, some SEO stuff, and eighty bajillion landing pages you forgot about back when it was still funny to rick-roll someone. Who’s doing all this content? Are they talking to each other? Should someone be in charge? Who? Come feel the love as a marketer, a CMS wonk, a UX designer, and a typical SME are brought together (Jerry Springer-style) to discuss the joys of cross-channel content strategy. Continue Reading »

[ SXSW Bios ] #sxswwp

• @photomatt
• @johnbattelle

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[SXSW Bio]

• @jondahl

Brief

Programming is writing. A programmer’s job is to express abstract ideas in a specific language – just like the poet, the essayist, and the composer. But while writers and composers spend years improving their style, many programmers think style stops with “two-space indentation”. This needs to change. This presentation will discuss style in music, writing, and software. We’ll look at such diverse sources as George Orwell, Mozart, and punk music, and will find that much of art revolves around complexity and minimalism – just like software. Finally, we’ll look at specific patterns and tools for writing software that is not just effective and efficient, but stylistically beautiful. Continue Reading »

I recently began working as managing director of the web department for an institution in dire need of a web overhaul. The institution is made up of about 20 colleges. Their sites – from the main website that serves as a gateway to the individual colleges sites – all need to be (re)designed and the content moved to a CMS. I’ve been doing research, developing a plan for moving forward but have run into tremendous resistance from senior management with regards to a realistic understanding of what needs to be done and the costs involved. Anyone have any guidance on what realistic expectations for a web redesign budget should be (per site, design and coding) and how to sell it to senior management? And/or least expensive options for a site redesign.

Have you read Kristina Halvorson‘s book “Content Strategy for the Web“? The process of building a strategy around the most important part of this endeavor—the content—includes tying in business/institutional strategies and goals. If you can show how this project will support the institution at a business/strategic level, you go a long way with senior admin.

Also, the warning is inherent: You can put all the money you want into Design and CMS and Coding, but if the content sucks, you’ve wasted their money. Show how you can insure that the design/cms/etc costs are worthwhile by showing how they support a content strategy (that you developed before beginning the entire process, right?).

Someone (probably on Twitter) said that content strategy is a business asset, not just a change to your web process. Senior admin like to make decisions about business assets. Once they see your strategy for their business web content, if you show them how producing this content supports their overall strategy, they will want to know how they can protect it.

Well, you protect it with editorial staff, good design, and a CMS to run it.

Lack of a content strategy usually leads to stale content, unnecessary, useless, or uninteresting content. No one has been charged with its planning, care and feeding early in the process (only its generation right before launch). Information is separated from redundancy and noise due to its inherent “surprise value”. Richard Dawkins discusses the economics of information transfer:

“It rained in Oxford every day this week” carries relatively little information, because the receiver is not surprised by it. On the other hand, “It rained in the Sahara desert every day this week” would be a message with high information content, well worth paying extra to send. [American engineer Claude Shannon] wanted to capture this sense of information content as “surprise value”. It is related to the other sense — “that which is not duplicated in other parts of the message” — because repetitions lose their power to surprise. Note that Shannon’s definition of the quantity of information is independent of whether it is true. The measure he came up with was ingenious and intuitively satisfying. Let’s estimate, he suggested, the receiver’s ignorance or uncertainty before receiving the message, and then compare it with the receiver’s remaining ignorance after receiving the message. The quantity of ignorance-reduction is the information content.

Shannon’s unit of information is the bit, short for “binary digit”. One bit is defined as the amount of information needed to halve the receiver’s prior uncertainty, however great that prior uncertainty was (mathematical readers will notice that the bit is, therefore, a logarithmic measure).

— Richard Dawkins, The Information Challenge | Australian Skeptics

When web content carries no surprise value for the reader, is it ignored? Could surprise value be tied to purposeful seeking (user tasks)? Is the pleasure / accomplishment we feel when an interaction produces useful outputs related to this surprise value? How is this idea reflected in content strategy? Could one objective of content strategy be to create content that maintains the surprise value of information?

We can’t encourage adoption of content strategy into the web site build process unless we can demonstrate success. Has anyone found success stories on the web? Have you your own story to tell? Comment here!

So the iPad is a large-format iPod Touch when people thought Apple would be entering the tablet market the same way everyone else has entered that market: re-working an operating system to a touch/large-format interface. People were expecting Mac OS X on a touch screen. Instead, Apple decided to expand the featureset of the mobile environment used in the iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Even more device-centric than Mac OS X, the mobile environment is geared toward getting the best bang out of mobile-sized processors rather than mediocrity. This is always Apple’s approach, so why are we surprised by a product that does things in a different way? Yet controversy abounds and the technorati is sadface.
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