In it, toward the bottom, was a small item on the Dot Earth blog about a study of the potential causes of the “Little Ice Age”, an era of depressed temperatures worldwide from the fourteenth century to the early twentieth.  While the study focused on the delicate nature of the global climate — how relatively small nudges can dramatically change local weather — I was left wondering more about this Little Ice Age.

So I looked up “Little Ice Age” on Wikipedia and was introduced to a scientifically and historically fascinating episode in human history.  A subset of that article discussed increased volcanic activity during the LIA, and linked to something called the Year Without A Summer, which I learned had wreaked havoc globally on crops and therefore on societies generally.

At the bottom of that article was a list of “See Also” links to similar events in climate/human history, which included such enticing titles as “New England’s Dark Day“, “White Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere“, and the tersely ominous “Volcanic winter“. In the span of a half an hour, my life had gained an entirely new category of fascination — the dramatic, unpredictable, worldwide climate event resulting from a volcanic eruption.

Whenever episodes like this crop up, I am struck by how seamless and almost lubricated the activity of gathering information has become due to the Internet.  It took me less than an hour to find out more about this topic than a full day (at least) in a library would have done just fifteen years ago.

At first this revelation (which I have almost daily), made me feel very hopeful about humanity.  With near-universal access to all of this information, how will we avoid an imminent era of peace and unity?  Almost as soon as I had that thought, I began to feel a sense of the precariousness of  both factual authority and access to certain kinds of information.

Because it’s clear that my journey depended almost entirely on the sphere of information I live in — one that includes the New York Times, scientific journals, and Wikipedia.  What sorts of narratives are emerging for people who either don’t find those sources of information credible, don’t know they exist, don’t have access to the Internet, or can’t even read? How far apart is my worldview from theirs? How do we start to see the world more similarly, thus making unity even a marginal possibility?

Hearing about these two current events in the same news broadcasts this week has given me a bit of cultural whiplash.

I own and use a few Apple products, most of which I need in order to do my job.  They are elegant.  They are easy to use.  They are functional.  Despite all of these things, they are still consumer electronics that I paid a huge premium for.  They are not works of fine art, and they are certainly not works of transformative public policy.

So, while I agree wholeheartedly that Steve Jobs was a visionary who changed consumer electronics dramatically worldwide, the hagiographies that have been sprouting up everywhere are somewhat disturbing to me.  The man was a CEO whose main responsibility was to generate profits for his company’s shareholders.  This situation does not usually a saint make.  Furthermore,

Arik Hesseldahl of BusinessWeek magazine opined that “Jobs isn’t widely known for his association with philanthropic causes”, compared to Bill Gates’ efforts. After resuming control of Apple in 1997, Jobs eliminated all corporate philanthropy programs. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Philanthropy

In short, Steve Jobs was absolutely, fundamentally part of the 1% of American society holding over 75% of American wealth (and likely 99% of its power and influence).  While I don’t view Mr. Jobs and his ilk as The Enemy, I do view them as a huge roadblock to meaningful reform in this country right now.

So, yes, let’s praise the man for his achievements.  But let’s also make an example out of him and encourage other wealthy entrepreneurs to spread their wealth around through philanthropy, through paying their share of federal and state taxes, and through agitating for policies that will help others less fortunate than them have the same opportunities for success that they had.

Anyway, I’ve never once used one, mostly because I don’t even know where one is around here.

So a few weeks ago I was looking at one of these coupons and it dawned on me: They obviously have my address; why can’t they just print the address of the nearest BBB on the coupon? Instead they have a “visit our website to locate your nearest store”, which, for lazy Americans like myself, is way too much to ask.

So I wrote them an email suggesting, among other things, that they change their mailouts:

Hi, BB&B  -

Two things:

1) I get your 20% coupons in the mail pretty regularly, though I don’t think I’ve ever once used one. I realized this week why: You have my address, obviously, yet you insist that I call or visit your website in order to determine the nearest store to me. If you could just print the address of that store ON THE COUPON, I might keep it in my car or something and drop by the location while I’m out and about.

2) Your website’s sitemap is worse than useless. I don’t know if you only have it there for bots or something, but in trying to figure out how to contact you, the sitemap was obviously of zero help to me.

Keep on truckin!

Today I got another Bed Bath & Beyond mailer and lo! it has the address of the nearest store on it.  Perhaps it was not just me giving them some common sense advice, but it still felt like amazing turnaround for an off-the-cuff suggestion.

If only my government was this responsive to common sense suggestions!

You have a piece of functionality that you need to add to your system. You see two ways to do it, one is quick to do but is messy – you are sure that it will make further changes harder in the future. The other results in a cleaner design, but will take longer to put in place.

Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem.

As is my wont, I immediately saw how this problem is not confined to the world of software (and web) development, but really to any project at all that has an element of iteration to it.

For example, consider making a table.  You really need this table fast, so you don’t spend as much time putting it together as you could.  Maybe you don’t let the glue set long enough or you don’t countersink the wood screws.  Whatever the shortcut, shortcuts have consequences.  Your table might not last long or put up with continued use.

To go even further, away from the arena of “making stuff”, think about a relationship in your life where many initial missteps were made that were not vetted at the time.  Those missteps almost always come back to haunt you once the relationship is tested, even if that test is just the passing of time.

Now, as many have pointed out, sometimes the debt is necessary.  Martin Fowler again:

The metaphor also explains why it may be sensible to do the quick and dirty approach. Just as a business incurs some debt to take advantage of a market opportunity developers may incur technical debt to hit an important deadline.

So how can we get better at knowing the difference between the debt black hole and the debt that confers an advantage?  Which messes are worth making?  I’ve been thinking of some criteria:

• Have I encountered this situation in the past, and the debt just wasn’t worth it?  This is seemingly obvious, but oftentimes I find myself glossing over how bad it was last time.  It’s better to really get inside of how frustrating the shortcut ultimately was.
  
• Does it just keep bothering me?  This sounds vague, but I think all of us know what it’s like to have a decision or conflict or debt that gnaws at our minds.
• Will it possibly be the ruin of my project?  This is heavy, but needs to be asked, point-blank, at key decision times.  Sometimes we don’t want to believe something seemingly so small (and so helpful!) could undermine everything, especially if the alternative route is painful in any way.  Interestingly, many times I’ve confronted this metric only to realize that I actually didn’t care if the project destroyed itself. Which made me realize I was spending my time on the wrong project!

Over the spring and summer, I had the opportunity to work with Local Projects on the companion website to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.  The memorial doesn’t open until 9/11/11, but you can already start exploring  the names on the memorial wall now at the website:

http://names.911memorial.org/

For this project, I created the interface and client-side interactions for the CMS used to maintain the memorial names database.  This involved everything from concepting intuitive layouts and interactions within an existing design framework, to handing the data off to the server via JSON.

I also pitched in on the rest of the guide’s front-end development, in particular scripting the interactions for scrolling through the names on the wall.

It’s rare that a project gives me the chance to do new things (build a CMS from scratch) while contributing to a meaningful cause (remembering 9/11).  It was great to have such an opportunity in this site.

Frequently, clients want to include a page on their website that both welcomes the new user into their world and also expresses their mission and philosophy in detail. They also often want this page listed first in their main navigation, which is tough from a user-focused perspective. I usually advocate putting the things first that your users are putting first, and reading a lengthy essay on how your organization views the world is almost never their primary goal when visiting your website.

But I was recently disarmed by just such a main navigation point, and it had everything to do with the language.  The link said, “Hello”.  As a human, my immediate impulse was to say “hello” back, and the only way I knew how to do this in the context of visiting a website was to click the link.

That transaction amazed me, not least because once I got to the page I realized it was just the usual four paragraphs of abstract corporate purpose.  I had unwittingly clicked through to a mission statement!

Not to put too fine a point on it here, but the words we use in the context of applications matter (and not just for SEO).  A door that says “pull” is very different than a door that says “push”.  A link that says “hello” or “start here” or “read me” feels very different than a link that says “our mission” or “our philosophy” or “who we are”.  Had this nav point said one of the latter, I almost certainly would not have clicked it.

But really the lesson of my amazing experience is that even if you do manage to get a user at “hello”, you aren’t guaranteed a relationship with that user until you give them something worth clicking to.

This isn’t to say my and my colleagues’ expertise is not vast!  Advocating for users is an important part of all our  jobs — from information architecture, to user experience to strategy, to front-end development, to back-end integration.  But a bunch of people who make the Internet for a living have got to have a somewhat skewed perspective on how said Internet is actually being used.  At some point, if the project is going to be a long-term success, the actual user needs to be included in the planning.

To be fair, not all web endeavors require a robust usability testing phase.  The less app-like a website is — that is, the less complex a user’s interaction with the site will be — the less user testing it likely requires.  I even made a (terrifically complex) chart to illustrate this:

(Where 0% appiness is equivalent to an ad campaign site that does not contain a single user interaction more complex than a hyperlink, and where “infinite” weeks spent on usability testing means “on-going”.)

However, at this point in the web’s development, we’d be hard-pressed to find a site that is truly 0% appy.  Even a site that is ultimately just an ad campaign usually attempts to get information from its users via a form of some kind.  Furthermore, in my experience, the more brochure-like a site is, the more likely it is that there are some innovative design leaps being taken by the creative minds involved in its production — which recommends more usability testing.

Even furthermore, we seem to have finally gotten to a place where everyone recognizes that wholesale redesigns every few years is suboptimal.  Instead, web-makers are opting instead to continually tweak and update (often based on user feedback! Ahem).

So, really, that chart up there should look like this:

That’s right. I pulled out an asymptote.  Well, almost an asymptote.

Clearly, as I am arguing in this very post, you should not take my word for it.  There’s actual research backing up my mad claims!  Check it:

Wikipedia’s “References” section for its article on Usability Testing is a great place to start, though it focuses on user testing generally, not specifically for websites.

Unsurprisingly, there are whole blogs devoted to the science of usability research.  Though one should be skeptical of the data on a site promoting a service it provides, there’s a lot of externally-funded stuff on there.

If you’ve got an extra $499 laying around, this report from Forrester Research looks promising: Need To Cut Costs? Improve the Web Site Experience.

I’m sure there’s even a kit out there to help you transform user advocacy into cold, hard usability testing. Don’t make me Google this stuff for you.

This prompted a lively (read: caffeine-fueled) discussion centering around morality, courage, and changing one’s mind.  JT opened by expressing his unease at people who come at a certain position because of personal experience, rather than because the position is philosophically correct.  Our go-to example of this is the pro-war parent who becomes a pacifist when their child is injured or killed in combat.

Our ensuing dialogue increasingly focused not just on the idea of changing one’s moral stance, but more specifically on how one changed one’s stance.  It is one thing to be the person who has rationally and emotionally considered their own as well as others’ viewpoints, and who has emerged with a balanced and empathetic viewpoint.  It is quite another to be the person who has changed one’s mind due to new information or personal experience.  The narrative this changed person tells about their change says a lot about something larger — a meta-morality, perhaps.

Obviously, there’s no shortage of voices in our culture calling for people to admit when they’ve been wrong.  And it has been my experience that in the last few years those calls are being heeded more and more, possibly as a backlash to the ironclad tone set by Bush during his presidency.  Apparently, our culture is beginning to get over the need for leaders who are steadfastly unwavering in their views.

However merely saying, “I’ve changed my mind” — without further explanation — is curiously unsatisfying.  It’s nearly as dissatisfying, in fact, as when no change takes place at all, as it glosses over the complexity of the transformation.  Merely switching sides appears self-serving and ultimately erodes one’s credibility.  More importantly, it doesn’t invite others to grapple with the issue as well.

What does feel satisfying is the complete narrative:  ”Here’s what I thought before and why I thought it.  Then this and this and this happened and I realized how narrow my view had been.  I wish I had been able to see outside of my narrow view in the absence of personal experience.  I hope that others who hold my previous view might empathize with my experience and change their minds too.”

How much more courageous — and humble — does that sound?

A similar act of courage in our current cultural climate is admitting that you just don’t know, and that not knowing doesn’t necessarily diminish your overall authority.  One striking example of this happened recently at the first 2012 GOP debate. When asked about foreign policy, Herman Cain stated basically that he doesn’t have enough information to have a position.  He assumes that the President has access to classified information and expert opinions that he currently doesn’t, and in the absence of that information, he can’t make any substantive claims about foreign policy.

How different would President Obama’s shifts away from his campaign rhetoric appear if he were to be upfront about what made him change tack?

There is something deeply cathartic about admissions like these.  Something, dare I say it, culturally mature.  It gives me some hope that we are starting to be able to handle more complexity and ambiguity in our public discourse than has heretofore seemed possible.  And who knows — maybe the more this discourse invites everyone to change, the easier changing will become.

The most exciting part of the site is the part I didn’t build!  The incomparable Sean Carstensen put together a Flash-based app which allows web users to hear the cycle of sounds that comprise Sun Boxes while seeing a slideshow of the boxes in action.  We hope to expand this experience to mobile devices, and to add functionality that encourages users to “stage” Sun Boxes on their own with as many devices as they have at hand.

Also coming soon: the Sun Boxes store! T-shirts, recordings, and things so exciting I’m not allowed to tell you about them!

I built the site on the WordPress platform, with jQuery as the primary JS platform.  For the newsletter sign-up, I used Quad’s excellent script for using AJAX on the DreamHost list signup form.  I did mod it slightly, as I am using more than the customary name and email fields on the site.  In order to avoid the tedium of spelling out each extra variable, I modded Quad’s submitToList() function to just grab every non-submit form input and serialized it all using jQuery’s serializeArray() function.  Damn if that wasn’t just easy as pie!

Check it out: http://www.sun-boxes.com/

I have no idea who made this mix.  It appeared at some point in my sister’s car during the summer of 1992, presumably having been lifted from the office of the country club she was a lifeguard at.

This post is basically a thank-you note to that unknown mixtape author who introduced my 13-year-old self to the Smiths, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, the English Beat, General Public, the Cure, and the Replacements.  Who would I be now without this mix? There’s just no telling.

Track Listing

Side A

1. Soviet Snow by Shona (misspelled Shana in the notes) Laing
2. The Celiba Sea by Vigil
3. What Have I Done To Deserve This by the Pet Shop Boys
4. I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boom Town Rats
5. Cut Me Down by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
6. Shell Shock by New Order
7. No Stars by Figures on a Beach
8. A Million Things by the Lucy Show
9. The Game by Echo & the Bunnymen
10. Girlfriend in a Coma by the Smiths
11. Mirror in the Bathroom by the English Beat

Side B

1. Mexican Radio by Wall of Voodoo
2. Pop Music by M
3. Don’t Go by Yaz
4. End of the World as We Know It by REM
5. Let’s Go To Bed by the Cure
6. Psycho Killer by the Talking Heads
7. Phantom Bride by Erasure
8. Blister in the Sun by the Violent Femmes
9. Faults & All by General Public
10. She Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals
11. Everyday I Write the Book by Elvis Costello
12. A New England by Billy Bragg
13. Can’t Hardly Wait by the Replacements
14. Superman by REM

I recently recreated Keg O’ Tunes as a playlist in iTunes.  It was interesting which tracks I already had as MP3s (Girlfriend in a Coma, Mirror in the Bathroom, Superman) and which ones I had a very hard time tracking down (No Stars, A Million Things).  It was also interesting how many nuances of the physical artifact were lost.  On the mixtape, Psycho Killer begins abruptly and with some weird tone problems presumably left over from whatever tape was serving as the “master” in this case.  And the end of the song gets cut off prematurely.  The MP3 can’t be made to behave this way.

Ultimately the recreation process made me think about how much less precious a mix is when it arrives via ZIP file.  Even a mix CD fails (and failed, when it first emerged) to stir me the way a mixtape did and does.  It used to take hours to make a good tape — first planning what should be on it, then really considering the order for the songs, queuing up  each cassette, trying to make the transitions between songs as non-obnoxious as possible (though now I find the click from hitting stop/record really endearing).

My nostalgia doesn’t delude me into thinking there aren’t other things serving the purpose of the mixtape in friendships and romances now, but I don’t think I know what they are.  If I was 13 now and had a crush on someone, how would I let them know it?