arts

Jason Fried decided to part with the “Getting Real” presentations he’s been giving for a while and focused on why the details matter and how 37signals thinks about the details of their products. His talk was sprinkled with tons of application demonstrations and interface development experience.

Fried started with a high level discussion on the building Seed 3 was being held in, S. R. Crown Hall, by Mies van der Rohe. This building is a great example of how paying attention to details yields a product beyond the base components. You can feel the details before you even see them. For instance, one of the things that Crown Hall is most well known for is its floating ceiling, something you don’t necessarily catch when you walk through the door - it’s too subtle for that. It’s only upon deeper reflection and analysis that you see the thought behind the design; you notice the gap between the edges of the ceiling and the windows running the entire perimeter of the building. Van der Rohe really wanted a feeling of floating to permeate the space and it does. Light changes moment to moment, altering the entire mood of the interior. The roof is suspended from the building frame above. None of the interior walls or posts are structural.

Also noteworthy, in Crown Hall, is the alignment of all the building materials - the roof tiles line up with the floor tiles, which line up with the building frame and windows. Everything is perfect. Even smaller things, like the sprinkler system, are made to fit within the overall design concept, they’re not afterthoughts.

These observations are what led Fried into discussing the development of software. One of the nice benefits to working in software, rather than building masterworks of architecture, is that you can build and tweak iteratively and quickly at very low cost. For Fried’s software, “building IS designing.”

37signals tends to use pretty low resolution designs. In fact, if it can’t be drawn with a sharpie, they feel there is too much detail. It’s only by building in this way that you end up focusing on actual user experiences with your applications rather than thinking in terms of artsy screens. The products 37signals builds try to think through people actually using them for repetitive workflows. For instance, task entry using Ta-Da Lists is as simple as title -> return -> task -> return -> task …

Writing copy

At 37signals, they consider copy to be part of the design and not just a means of explaining their product. When you write copy, “it has to make sense to read out loud,” says Fried. Explain your features in ways that your audience will understand, not in techno-babble.

“If you wouldn’t say something in conversation, don’t say it in your app.” - Jason Fried, 37signals

Make your app have “photographic memory”

One of the other UI concepts expressed in Fried’s talk was about remembering what your users are doing so that you can make it easier for them to repeat it. User preferences are a horrible way of doing this. It’s much better to look at what your users are doing and have the application be smart enough to guess it the next time.

An example of this in action would be adding tasks to a to-do list. If you have multiple to-do lists, it’s not a good idea to have a default list and then require customers to always move items from that list to other lists. Instead, have the application be mart enough to know which list a task was added to and remember that to suggest the next time the user adds a task. Chances are good that your users are repeating tasks if they’re using your application - they’re in a particular mode and it’s best not to break their concentration.

Time is the new vector of interface design

How you time activities that occur on your site and in your application has an enormous impact on how responsive and intuitive your application feels to users. If a user deletes an item from a list and the object just disappears or the page refreshes the page, this time without the item, it might be difficult for the user to figure out what happened. If you instead, show the deleted item fading out over the course of a quarter second and then the items below it sliding up the list to replace it, you’ve done something more visually intuitive and noteworthy while making the user more comfortable the action they just completed.

Other Jason Fried:

• BusinessPOV Video from June 2008: Jason Fried explaining how his work is like that of a museum curator or a chef with a request to add bananas to his lasagna.
• BusinessPOV Video from April 2007: Jason explains how 37signals builds software with tiny decisions.

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

I’ve always loved this poem and now I’ll have a beat to drop to it.

[via The Elegant Variation]

[click to continue...]

I went to the Seed 3 Conference in Chicago. This is the first in a series of posts about the presentations I saw there.

Carlos Segura is the founder of Chicago-based Segura Inc and runs a whole host of websites and commercial interests centering around his design expertise and passions. At Seed 3, Carlos took the crowd through a history of his businesses and explained the importance of respecting your audience, picking your clients, and doing work you can be proud of.

On seeing things differently

Carlos started out his talk by showing off some pictures of sewer covers. In New York City, he pointed out that the manhole covers are made in China and India. In Los Angeles, he noticed that they also came from India. In Chicago, they were produced in Mexico. These are the sorts of things he believes are important to notice, the details that slip past casual view.

“Communication that doesn’t take a chance, doesn’t stand a chance.” - Carlos Segura

The Segura Inc. businesses

Carlos is involved in a lot of sites/businesses:

• t26 - a type foundry. On t26, font designers showcase and sell their wares. The site was designed to market the type as well as the designer and early on in its history, they used to create music videos to go along with each font, a nifty idea that helped people understand the attitude and feeling that the write fonts could convey.
• 5inch.com - a site dedicated to CD packaging and printing.
  

  “Delivers the delivery vehicle for CDs.” - Carlos Segura

• CarType - a site for collecting design details (logos, emblems, typography, industrial art) of cars
• Segura Inc. - This is the overarching company and contract design firm. Carlos walked the crowd through various design projects such as working with fashion retailers on tags that live beyond purchase, comic book covers that didn’t look like comics, creating topographical pamphlets and brand identity for Rockshox, and working with Corbis to use their photos to tell stories through imaginative croppings and side by side presentation.

Words to work by: What I took away from this presenter

• “Respect for the audience is what will get you work from clients.” Nobody wants to work with a firm that’s “too cool” for their customers. Treat the customers as special and with respect.
• Similarly, “talk to the audience, not the client.” If the client has an issue, tell them “I’m not designing for you.”
• “Build relationships with clients that choose to listen to you.” Life is far too short to work with people that waste your time or make work feel unrewarding.
• “Be unique with what you’re asked to do.” When clients request your work, give them something more than what they were expecting.
• Only produce things that you can be proud of.
• “We create what we think the client needs (not just what they’re asking for).”
• “Cause and effect. The one choice we have the power to make - what we do with our time - is the choice we fail at most frequently. You have to be willing to accept the byproduct of being fired.”

Additional Stuff:

• BusinessPOV video interview of Carlos Segura out in front of the conference

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

A cute short from Hillman Curtis about two friends and an exercise to bring them closer. Does it work?

[Via Coudal Partners]

Imagine standing in a completely vacant Shibuya Station admiring the lines: up, down, left, right. Beautiful. An opportunity that doesn’t exist in the everyday. It has the atmosphere of one of those hidden spaces accessed through Haruki Murakami’s fiction.

Does anyone have an idea of how to take a screenshot of a flash tour like this? I really love some of the frames I’ve been able to create by exploring and I’d like to take a hack at drawing a few later but I don’t know how to capture the image.

Two outstanding pieces of Chilean architecture with some striking similarities.

• Spa Las palmas de Leyda / Cristobal Valenzuela Haeussler - A beautiful Chilean Spa retreat. Natural slatted wood exterior outside of the windows provides privacy while still allowing light. Straight lines, clean, floor to ceiling windows.

  

• House on the road to Farellones / Max Nuñez & Bernardo Valdes - Another Chilean beauty, this one a house. Concrete and glass captures a scenic view of Santiago. I absolutely love this one.

  

Riding the elevator up on the way to work today, one of our QA engineers mentioned to me that he had no idea how our team was going to hit a deliverable for Monday. Our devo site is in too much flux to be certain that we will stabilize it in time. Shrugging, I channeled Philip Henslowe (played by Geoffrey Rush), the hapless theatre owner from “Shakespeare in Love” and stated “it’s a mystery.” That’s when somebody else on the elevator chimed in and said, “what you need is deus ex machina.”

Boy do I work with some smart people.

“Deus ex machina” means “God from a machine” but it derives from the world of Greek tragedy (especially referring to the plays of Euripides) and refers to the use of a cheap plot device to resolve difficult situations in the drama. The Wikipedia article uses the 1978 “Superman” movie as a more modern day example. Remember when Lois Lane gets buried in her car and dies only to have Superman reverse time by flying around the globe so fast that time reversed? Superman had never previously unveiled this talent and I’m not so sure he ever used it again, it was just a bit too convenient. That’s deus ex machina.

Aristotle’s “Poetics” has this to say about the use of deus ex machina:

It is therefore evident that the unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the deus ex machina - as in the Medea, or in the return of the Greeks in the Iliad. The deus ex machina should be employed only for events external to the drama - for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy. Such is the irrational element the Oedipus of Sophocles.

Music and corresponding video made entirely from Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland.” Amazing and actually catchy. I want to hear a remix of “Apocalypse Now.” Reznor?

And while we’re on the subject…

This article was too good to pass up. Does the punishment fit the crime? Will it work?

Brandon Keim recounts the essence of a talk by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran given at the World Science Festival.

The essence of art is, arguably, metaphor, and its practitioners are especially prolific — and metaphor is just a convenient shorthand for the connection of unlinked cognitive phenomena. That’s exactly what appears to happen in the minds of synesthetes. Far-flung parts of their brain have unusually high levels of cross-wiring.