I originally drafted this post exactly a year ago, right after the Paris attacks. I didn’t post it then because I thought it would be too inflammatory, and I was honestly just too sad. I didn’t feel like getting into an Internet Argument. I still think it’s true, though, and think it’s worth saying even though I’m sure there are plenty of people out there just waiting to ignore the nuances. Either way, here it is.

11/16/2015

Since Paris was attacked on Friday night, my Facebook feed has exploded with posts about how fundamentally unjust it is that Americans are so upset about this event, but they weren’t upset the day before when Beirut was attacked.

While I think it’s an argument more persuasively made later, when emotions are not quite so high, I do understand the impulse behind it: There is an inherently dehumanizing aspect to feeling more empathy for some and less empathy for others, and we know where dehumanization leads.

However, the virulence of these posts prevented me from showing solidarity with the people in Paris for fear of the flak I would get for NOT having shown the same solidarity with the people of Beirut the day before. And that just means less empathy and less solidarity to go around.

In actuality, my empathy for Parisians is not a sign of my lack of empathy for the people of Beirut. In fact, it’s a sign of my normal, if lamentable, neurology.

Before I continue, let me take a moment to unequivocally state the obvious: The life of a person in Beirut is not fundamentally or objectively worth more or less than the life of a person in Paris.

While there’s some disagreement on the exact number, current science suggests each human can only see between 150 and 300 other humans as fully developed, complex individuals. This limitation clearly comes with some dire consequences – hate crimes and genocide defining the far end of the spectrum, nimbyism and neglect covering the nearer end. However, it is practical from an evolutionary perspective.

In order to survive as a social species, we each need to know and care about the people upon whom we most depend for survival. In an abstract sense, in a modern world, that group could include some complete strangers on the far side of the planet. But even now, even with the Internet and a globalized economy, one’s in-group is still mostly populated by the people who are geographically and culturally proximate – our families, our neighbors, the people we went to school with, the people we work with, etc.

Let’s take me as an example. I know people in France. I have been to France. If there is another language I come close to being able to speak besides English, it’s French. The victims of the crimes in Paris were doing things I do on the regular: I go to rock shows of the Eagles of Death Metal sort, I sit outside on patios at restaurants eating dinner. I don’t frequent huge sporting events, but I’ve been to a few.

Beirut, on the other hand, is slightly further outside my usual sphere. I know people who were born in Lebanon, and still others who have visited Lebanon, but not anyone who currently lives there. Since Beirut is a modern city, I can imagine that the lives of its residents are largely like my life, but I don’t know that viscerally from having seen it or from knowing people who are currently living it.

That said, my visceral reaction to hearing the news about Paris on Friday differed from my reaction to hearing about Beirut on Thursday because of Paris’s societal proximity to my life. I don’t think that’s wrong. I think it’s the emotional reality of a human existence for most people most of the time.

What is wrong is preventing people from expressing empathy by making them feel that their empathy is misplaced or fundamentally bad in some way. We need more empathy in this world, not less, and it’s not a finite resource.

What’s even more wrong is to ignore the reality of our biases – to pretend humans are fundamentally different than we are – and thereby to inhibit our ability to mitigate or overcome those biases. Simply asserting one should, at root, care equally about strangers as one does about friends does not make that any more practically possible than it already is. However, if we accept that it isn’t possible through sheer will, then we can start to build structures and institutions to counterbalance them.

It’s only because we know we’re forgetful that we keep to-do lists and calendars. We could pretend that it’s possible for a human being to just remember everything, or we can accept our limitations and build structures in life to mitigate them.

Likewise, only when we’re able to honestly see and confront our tribal biases can we start to support the work that takes care of the people outside of our tribe – because they deserve it. Their lives are worth just as much.

Everything you know about RIP Prince is wrong.

— Wrong Bot (@yrwrong) April 21, 2016

Continue reading “Everything you know about Prince is wrong: Wrong Bot memorializes The Artist” →

My friend Liz’s new graphic memoir, Tomboy, was released on Tuesday. Reading all of the interviews and press she’s been getting this week has been a true joy for me. It’s also made me want to write publicly about why I find her book so meaningful (beyond it being an awesome work of art by a very close friend).

Continue reading “Liz Prince’s “Tomboy” Is an Invitation to a Better World” →

In the research I did for my recent post on CSS preprocessors, I came upon a comment that went something like this:

Not using LESS/SASS is like refusing to use a Javascript library.  All CSS preprocessors do is handle the common repetitive tasks in CSS so you don’t have to.

I can’t find where I originally read it, unfortunately, but the sentiment popped up a number of times and has been eating at me ever since I read it.

Javascript libraries are Javascript.  One need not learn a new syntax or resort to command line at any point to get jQuery to work in a project; just include the file in a script reference in your HTML.

A better analogy would be that Javascript is to Javascript libraries as CSS is to toolkits like Twitter Bootstrap, html5boilerplate, et al. (many of which I have had the pleasure of using recently).  These packages leverage plain old CSS to take care of common and repetitive tasks like rounded corners, gradients, and sprites.

The appropriate Javascript analog to CSS preprocessors is CoffeeScript, a new/separate syntax that outputs to Javascript.

CSS preprocessors (Sass, Less, et al) have come up repeatedly in the last few weeks.  I have some existing views on the topic that seem to take a lot of preprocessor advocates by surprise.  One even suggested I write a blog post about it, so I sat down to do just that, starting off with some research, as I like to do.

Lo! The blog post I was about to write has already been written — several times, in fact:

• “Sass isn’t for me”, by Nathan Borror
• The Problem With CSS Preprocessors, by Miller H. Borges Medeiros
• LESS Sass. More OOCSS, by Blake Haswell

Those are just the first few I found; I’m sure there are many, many more.  Plus, the above posts have much more lively and interesting discussions in the comments than would probably happen on my outpost of a blog.

Many of the anti-preprocessor arguments overlap, but they broadly go like this:

• The layer of abstraction a preprocessor adds is not worth the cost of integrating it into an existing workflow (e.g. setting up a development environment, adding team members, maintenance, bug fixing, et al)
• Preprocessors solve problems that could easily be solved with better CSS (e.g. variables and mixins are just classes by another name)
• The CSS output of a preprocessor is less smart than the CSS output of a human

I more or less agree with all of that.  Like many of the authors above, I think being able to perform functions and set variables inside of CSS could be very useful; so why not make CSS4 do so?  Then we have a single, open standard that browsers already know how to parse and that developers already know how to code.

What’s troubled me since the first time I heard about preprocessors was why on Earth anyone would think to make one.  I’ve always found CSS’s syntax both logical and flexible.  My complaints with it are few and minor.  But then, I do not have a computer science degree.

What I eventually came to realize is that computer programmers do not like CSS because it is not a programming language (see also the relationship of Haml to HTML, which is also not a programming language).  Some found that fact so irritating that they resolved to write a CSS-generating programming language with a syntax that made more sense to them.  Other programmers were overjoyed to at last be freed from the tyranny of CSS; the rest of us were surprised to find that, unbeknownst to us, one of our favorite tools had actually been terrorizing many people (many smart people, it turns out, which made me wonder if I’m just a moron…).

Ultimately, there may come a day when I find that the utility of preprocessors outweigh their associated costs; enough people — and enough people whom I respect — use them that from a statistical perspective I have to assume this will happen eventually.  It just hasn’t happened yet.

Credit unions are rad.  They are not-for-profit organizations. Their members (i.e. YOU) are their customers, not shareholders, so they are always looking for ways to make you more money and to keep your business.  Here’s a Lifehacker article that goes into more detail on why you should switch.

These days, many of us have our checking accounts deeply integrated into our financial lives via automatic bill payment, direct deposit, and other services.  Untangling oneself can seem very daunting, which is why I took notes during my transition and am posting them publicly here.  It’s as easy as 1-2-3 (-4-5-6-7-8)!

1. Find a credit union you qualify for.
2. From the list you qualify for, evaluate which one would best suit your needs. Criteria for me included:
   • online banking tools
   • the ability to mail in my deposits and/or use direct deposit so I wouldn’t have to travel to their single branch every time I get a check
   • interest-bearing checking accounts
3. Open your new account(s) at the credit union of your choice. Deposit enough money to get you through a month of bill paying. Be sure to walk out with, at the very least, your new account number and routing number. (I walked out with that plus 12 starter checks and a whole lot of literature).
4. Transfer all bill paying, automatic payments, etc. over to the new credit union account. I actually went so far as to keep a running list of places to look for accounts I might have linked with my bank account. Then I just set aside an afternoon to go through all of it, account by account.  Don’t expect to get everything settled that very afternoon; several of my accounts were on the verge of clearing a payment, so I needed to wait for that to go through.  There were also a few that had auto-payment processes I could only change offline by calling or mailing something in.
5. Wait a few weeks and watch the old account to make sure there are no other automatic payments being taken out that you forgot about or checks left to clear.  My tack was to wait one week after the last thing cleared to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
6. Close your for-profit bank account. The bank employee who helps you do this may ask what your reasons are. Feel free to get as activisty as you want, but you don’t owe them an explanation.  Money speaks for itself.  Walk out (or hang up) with a check for your remaining balance.
7. Deposit that check at your new credit union.
8. Reap rewards.

We get these Bed Bath & Beyond coupons in the mail roughly once a week. Perhaps you’ve seen them?

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!

Today, I came across the idea (probably via stackoverflow) of technical debt. To quote Martin Fowler:

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!

The field of “user experience” is in a phase right now where everybody seems to acknowledge that it’s important, but no one wants to actually invest the time and money to make users the centerpiece of their web strategy.  Even when there is a testing phase baked into projects, it’s usually one week (or less) spent asking four or five volunteers to complete a remedial set of tasks in the company of a test-giver who can conveniently prompt certain behavior.  Ultimately, we often end up gambling on the expertise of the individuals on the web team rather than getting some robust data from actual site users.

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.

jennamarino So tired of the “designers need to code” talk. We heard you.. and you … and you. Got it. Is there anyone still arguing the fact?

skybondsor @jennamarino I don’t think it’s nearly this cut & dried. I’m sure you would agree that devs with some design experience create better sites.

jennamarino @skybondsor hell yes, I agree! Yet you never hear that argument stated. Where is that posting? Where is that long drawn out discussion?

skybondsor @jennamarino I think my entire career is that post/discussion! But now you have inspired me to write it. Stay tuned!

So here we are.  How did we get here?  How did creating websites become a zero-sum game between “designers” and “developers”?

In short, we got here because the advertising world glommed onto the Internet first and thus dominated the thinking on what websites could and should be.  It was only fairly recently that everyone could agree websites are (and should be) more like applications and devices than like an ad in a magazine.  So we have this vestigial ad agency model where clients hire “creatives” to come up with a concept, which they then pass on to the “engineers” to build; rinse and repeat with each new “campaign cycle”.

However, as we are all (mostly) well aware at this point, users increasingly want websites to do things for them, sometimes complicated things, and they want those interactions to be intuitive.  It’s nice if the experience is also beautiful, but passively absorbing graphic assets is neither the ideal nor the dominant user case on the web these days.  Thus, the industrial design model is coming to seem ever more apt. In that model, many areas of expertise come to bear on creating an intuitive, usable product.

So, what is industrial design, exactly? According to Wikipedia:

Industrial design is the use of a combination of applied art and applied science to improve the aesthetics, ergonomics, and usability of a product, but it may also be used to improve the product’s marketability and production. The role of an industrial designer is to create and execute design solutions for problems of form, usability, physical ergonomics, marketing, brand development, and sales.

Wow!  Science AND art at the SAME TIME? Aesthetics AND usability?  From the ad-world perspective, this is a complete oxymoron. Creatives are not supposed to be analytical and engineers are not supposed to be creative. Usability and execution are supposedly the enemies of aesthetics.  And yet, here we have an age-old field where those things are expected to go hand in hand, often within the same person.

So, yes, it is very helpful when graphic designers have some coding experience; but it is also helpful when engineers have some eye for aesthetics.  These things are in constant interplay when creating an application. Everyone involved makes their own small decisions along the way that never reach the committee for consideration; it helps when those decisions always have the user’s experience in mind.

The familiar example is often that of a graphic designer creating visuals that are difficult or impossible to pull off inside of a browser.  But consider the developer who has to make a judgment call about a hover state that wasn’t fully described in the designs; hopefully that developer has enough of an aesthetic perspective to pick an interaction that fits with the overall design and is intuitive for the user (without having to call a meeting of every designer and stakeholder on the project).

Furthermore, consider code optimization; isn’t a big part of that aiming to make the user’s experience as seamless as possible? Knowing that users expect clicking “submit” to yield a wait of a few seconds — but not a wait of a minute — can help guide engineers’ priorities when designing the communication between  browser and server.

Obviously, there’s enough to graphic design, user experience planning, and programming that we should look with suspicion upon anyone claiming to do all of those things with equal expertise.  However, silo-ing our skills to the point where each perspective has no awareness of the others is dangerous.  At the very least it causes a base level of distrust amongst team members who are presumably working toward the same goal (user bliss).  At worst, it creates patchwork applications where “designed’ areas have a vastly different feel than areas of the site built entirely without graphic objectives in mind.

While listening to NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, my husband (hereafter referred to as “JT”) and I heard a piece about same-sex marriage legistlation in NY state. NPR played a clip from a speech Republican Assemblywoman Teresa Sayward gave in 2007: “I knew when my son was very young that he was different… I knew that I had to say something and I just told the story of my family and why I believe with all my heart that it’s a civil rights issue…”

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.