All of these things are wonderful for us, but it’s that semi-annual coffeehouse visit I want to talk about at the moment. Muddy Waters is the kind of indie coffeehouse that we love – they make fair trade (they use Counter Culture like many of our favorite shops in Atlanta), high quality products, they know their stuff, and they’ve created an atmosphere around art and culture. I’d say it is easily the best coffee for a hundred miles in any direction, and it stands up well to the best shops in bigger cities. This is a fascinating quality for such a small town to have, and this is one of the reasons we make sure to visit it every time we’re there.

Now, while I find all this by itself to indeed be praiseworthy, I was struck by different qualities on this visit, and was reminded of some of my own passions and dreams. It started while I was looking around at the various flyers on the wall. Like any good coffeehouse, they advertize local events, especially of the artistic kind. I happened to notice that, at the time, they were advertizing (and presumably sponsoring as well, from the appearance) a play about the Freedom Riders.

Again, Elizabeth City is a small, longstanding, rural Southern town. It was the location of a Civil War battle. It has its share of racial issues to this day, and I don’t know of any particular significance it has played in North Carolina’s various civil rights struggles. So it’s noteworthy, at least to me, that they’d even have such an event. Knowing that it was happening, it doesn’t at all surprise me that an artsy coffeehouse would sponsor or feature it, but that’s what got me thinking: this little coffeehouse in this little town is contributing, in a fairly significant way, to creating culture where it is.

That dream…

When I was in college, especially after getting together with my wife, we had a dream to open a coffeehouse of our own. By no means would it be a “Christian coffeehouse” but it would have been a coffeehouse that, as part of its identity, had a faith community. One could be a part of the coffeehouse’s artistic and cultural community without any involvement in the faith community, and so on. But we would offer art, music, community, spirituality, and wonderful coffee together in this space to anyone who wanted it and that would be our ministry. We could keep our various other interests (academia, web design, etc. as we followed them). But we left that behind, to a large extent, when we learned exactly how much student debt we had and how hard it is to create a financially sustainable coffeehouse, and since then we’ve been part of various alternative, emerging or Emergent faith communities that existed in other settings.

But on some level we haven’t forgotten that dream, and the hope we had to live among the people of a neighborhood and help create community and culture in it. To seek justice and peace there, and offer a chance to encounter God in a beautiful place with great drinks. And I was reminded sharply of it when I reflected on what Muddy’s is doing. That isn’t to say that they do or don’t have any interest at all in spiritual things, or that we would ever consider creating a thing in a small town as they’ve done. But it is to say that seeing them immersed in their own context, creating what they do, gave me a picture that I haven’t had in a while of how we had thought of immersing ourselves and creating something as well.

I don’t say that we’re going to do anything like this, either now or ever, necessarily. But I do say it was wonderful to think about again, and I want to mark that.

Now a theodicy, of course, is a theological attempt to figure out why bad things happen, where God is, what God’s role is, and so on. So believing certain things about God, from a certain theological standpoint, leads you to believe certain things about evil, and that’s the way the whole system holds together in evil times. Because if your theology can’t hold up to talk about bad things, what good is it?

Now since October when I started this draft, of course, we’ve had terrible events with the Sandy Hook massacre, other small school shootings, and even more absurd comments from politicians. Many of them are still, at their core, attempting to make theological statements that hold their views of God together in the midst of such hell.

I want to start with this intro because I think it’s important in understanding what’s really going on. It’s not (necessarily) that these people are uncaring and indifferent to suffering. I don’t believe they are, at least some of them. I really believe that their theological systems (there are only a few represented by these viewpoints – Reformed and Neo-Reformed evangelicalism, and vapid American civil religion are the biggest that I see) lead to only a few options for a coherent theodicy.

One of them, of course, is that God is angry with us, and so we should really be quaking in fear and repentance lest we also be shot up by assault rifles because that’s really the punishment we deserve; it’s just a stroke of fortune that those kids and teachers got it first. Another is that God is upset that we no longer have forced public prayer, that we take down public nativities and crosses and actually attempt to live respectfully in a pluralistic society, and is therefore petty enough to withdraw the protection our schools would otherwise have from assault rifles (because banning them is just not an option, so it must be God’s will).

Lest you think I’m saying it’s only Republicans that do this, Barack Obama had his own theodicy: that God chose to take the Sandy Hook children and other folks home, and so of course if you take that to its conclusion it had to be done by tearing their bodies apart with that assault rifle.

Now I’m intentionally being brief in the summaries of these theodicies, but I really think I’m representing them fairly because catastrophes bring out these beliefs, and it’s too easy to skip over their logical conclusions in the thick of things. Other bloggers, of course, covered many of these things when the events were happening and they gave beautiful, profound responses. I don’t want to take away from any of those, and I hope you saw them (two of the best are this one from Rachel Held Evans and this one from Greg Boyd).

What I wanted to do alongside and much later than those things (I don’t blog much these days, so it takes me a long time) is put some of these together and say: bad theodicies are dangerous and they come from theologies that are dangerous. It doesn’t mean these theologies and theodicies are held by people that don’t care about being dangerous, but it does mean that they are bad theologies and theodicies, and that they need to change. I don’t think it’s possible for all theodicies to be pleasing to God, and we shouldn’t act like it is in the name of unity with those we disagree with. These are terrible ideas and beliefs. They are wrong. They hurt the kingdom of God. They hurt people that God loves.

But equally importantly, they aren’t necessary. It’s not necessary to hold onto a theological system that thinks God is like that, and that people thus should be like that. There is a deep well of better theology, running through all of Scripture and the life of Jesus, that brings us in touch with the God who suffers with us and suffers for us, who always stands against oppression and for the oppressed and the oppressor. This God shows us better ways to live, gives us power to live in those ways and live a different kingdom in the small ways we can, and is always active in “those who are helping” as Mr. Rogers said. This God is always working through terrible events, not because this God causes terrible events or wants them to happen or has some overarching plan that includes terrible events, but because this God is able to redeem terrible events.

Don’t listen to bad theodicies just because they hold together theological systems. Those theological systems are bad if they depend on theodicies like that, regardless of how good their other qualities might be. God is better than that. God is for you, and God is for me, and God is for the people we are inclined to be against. Redemption is much better than we’ve been told.

To specify a little more, this project wasn’t creating a design, really; instead it was taking an existing design and refining it and expanding it to account for things that didn’t previously exist, or could be standardized, subtly improved upon, and so on. So there was quite a lot of design work that we did, especially for smaller devices and on the micro level as opposed to the macro, but that wasn’t the primary purpose.

Coming from that perspective, I think it’s important to reflect on how Twitter Bootstrap was used in this project, and what effects it had. For the sake of structuring my thoughts, I’m using the structure of Bootstrap’s own navigation: scaffolding, base CSS, Components, and JavaScript. Customize, for their purposes, is just a matter of excluding stuff you don’t need.

Scaffolding

The Bootstrap scaffold is essentially a CSS normalizer, a nestable grid system, and some bolted on responsive design features. The normalizer is freely available and used in many projects. While I am personally more a fan of the reset, the normalizer is fine once you get used to it. The grid system is decent, though we had to change a great deal of it since we were essentially dealing with a pre-defined design. It’s certainly not the best grid system I’ve seen, but it’s not the worst either.

The bolted on responsive part is what really bugged, and bugs, me. Bootstrap’s first version wasn’t responsive, and by default its second version isn’t either (though it is adaptive, and the differences are large). You can tweak things to make it responsive, but it doesn’t really indicate that you have to do that. This caused our team some issues, as we started working independently, and some folks went responsive while others didn’t, and we ended up having to stick with the default, adaptive version in the end. Again this is probably mostly because we were dealing with an existing design, but I think the documentation should mitigate this issue more than it does. Having an adaptive default in a system this complex is a failure on Bootstrap’s part, in my opinion.

Overall, I’d say this grid system is not worth using. Certainly there are worse ones, and that’s worth mentioning. But there are also far better ones (such as Frameless, Gridset, Skeleton, essentially any mobile first version and most desktop-first ones), from a capability/customization perspective and from a mobile-friendly/mobile-first perspective, and from a CSS/HTML perspective. Use one of those, if you have the choice. This one, I think, causes more issues than it solves.

Base CSS

The base CSS contains styles for a default typography framework, tables, forms, buttons, images, and icons. It’s all pretty good for what it is – nothing is glaringly ugly or unusable, but of course it’s all styled for Bootstrap, not your branding. We used quite a bit of this, though we changed the branding to match what we were using. Needing to do that caused significant issues and time wasting for us, because often it just wasn’t clear what needed to be overwritten to get rid of Bootstrap’s style conventions. There is a ton of CSS there, and while it is structured reasonably well there is just so much of it, and the design styles are so specific, that it is hard to track them down.

Overall, I’d again say that the base CSS is not worth using, if you aren’t using the Bootstrap styles. If you are using those styles, I’m sure it’s brilliant and worth using though not very custom, but if you have your own styles or are creating them as you create your site, create that stuff on your own from scratch, based on what you need functionally and visually. It’ll save time in the end. I do think such a base could be created in a much more design-agnostic way, but it would be much harder to do.

Components

Bootstrap includes a lot of components for things that sites and web apps commonly use – navs, typographical elements, buttons, image treatments, and so on. We used few of these – fewer than we had initially expected, simply because our design didn’t need them. The few that we did use (thumbnails, alerts, pull-left and pull-right, and several miscellaneous items), varied in how useful they were. The more design styles they had, the less useful and the more time we had to spend overwriting, as I mentioned before, and some of them were just mind-boggling when it came down to overwriting their default styles.

So again, I’d say that the components aren’t really worthwhile. They don’t use good markup (almost no HTML5 is here and they rely a great deal on lots of nested divs), they have a lot of included styles, and most of them would have to be completely rewritten to be used in a different design or markup system.

JavaScript

The JavaScript items include things like tabs, tooltips, popovers, alerts, accordions, carousels, and some nav treatments, among others. We used a few of these (especially tabs and accordions), and I can see places where clients will probably make use of some of the others. I’d say these are indeed worthwhile. In a lot of cases they’re better than competitive options (jQuery UI, for example).

The fascinating thing is that they’re often better for the same reasons that the other parts of Bootstrap are worse – they don’t depend as much on markup or style included with Bootstrap. When they do depend on specific CSS conventions, they are modern, future-friendly CSS conventions, not conventions you’d have to overwrite to use HTML5. Even a notable thing that we didn’t use – the slideshow – was a choice we made because we have to support older IE versions, and we already had slideshows that do that with good, clean code. We didn’t neglect it because it was bad, or couldn’t fit in our design; we neglected it because we had different requirements.

Hindsight is 20/20, and so on

I’d say that in our pre-project evaluation, the JavaScript items and the components were the chief reason we went with Bootstrap. My team had a short amount of time to evaluate things like this, and while we discussed and were concerned about all the things I mention in this post, we didn’t know how big an impediment they would end up being (not having previous experience with the design and code in the system). The JavaScript looked so helpful that it helped us make the decision we thought would save us the most time on a quick project.

But in the end, it didn’t and I would not make the same decision if I had to do it over again. I’d use a different grid system, and I’d write the rest of the stuff myself and use self-selected plugins. I think that would ultimately result in less code, less frustration, and a better product.

Now. Like many designers, I’ve also been watching, with even more interest, folks like Craig Mod as they talk about design and culture of books and ebooks and publishing and so on. I find that truly fascinating, and it indicates just how far we still have to go in creating the experiences that enable people to read digitally, as they surely will, and do it well, as they may or may not.

One specific thing about this hit me today, and it’s this: our ebooks need, and can really have, a “commons,” and so far they don’t have one. Let me explain. Kester Brewin wrote a post about how ebooks “remove text from common sight” and it’s true, as they currently are they do. I can’t imagine someone walking into my apartment and picking up my iPad to see what books are on it. How would they know what apps I use to read? Which home screen those apps are on? What if I had a password on it? Not to mention that it’s just really awkward to pick up a somewhat personal device like that and start snooping around on it.

Ebooks, on the one hand, have tried to solve their problem of hiddenness a bit. Amazon has its methods for sharing Kindle notes. There are cool apps like Readmill, Findings, and many others that allow people to give others glimpses into what they’re reading, what they like, and so on. But it’s very early in that process.

On the other hand, no one has any objection to walking into my apartment and looking at my bookshelves, and nor do I have any objection to them doing so. I do it too; it’s a fascinating way to learn about the voices that have shaped a person, what interests them, and how they think. I love our bookshelves.

But here’s the thing: they aren’t all that good a system for sharing and creating a commons, either. We don’t have enough bookshelves, and we don’t have enough space for the ones we do have. We have a big shelf and a medium shelf full in our bedroom, two smaller shelves full in our living room, a desk full in our dining room, and random boxes and lone books floating all around the apartment. No one can, in actuality, walk into our apartment with that curious heart that I love so much, and actually find out much about my wife and me. They’d have to walk into our bedroom for that. And once again, that’s just really awkward.

So to some extent, I disagree with Kester that the lack of a common space for books is a problem that ebooks have and physical books don’t. Depending on the space in which a person lives, it may or may not be exacerbated by ebooks, but it certainly isn’t created by them. It’s possible that our daughter (to use Kester’s example of a child finding a love of reading from looking at books) will be able to grow up looking at our bookshelves to find interesting things to read, but it’s really unlikely because of the kind of spaces in which we live.

But here’s the thing: ebooks, if we as designers realize how important this is to the intellectual and cultural life of a society and groups within it, could do a great deal to solve this problem. Book designers, interface designers, and hardware designers have a fascinating opportunity to create apps, experiences, and even devices that show the equivalent of the book titles on our shelves to the folks who come into our lives, whether in digital or physical spaces.

I really like some of the apps that have already been created, but they’ll get better. Especially if companies like Amazon eventually work on their ebook systems in the better interest of society, even if it hurts their monopoly a little bit, we’ll be able to do this much easier. Sharing notes and such is already pretty easy, and it’ll get better. Lending will get better.

We’ll also be able to create new experiences for doing things with the material available to us, whether it’s shared or purchased or lended or something else. There will be sites and apps that provide companions to books that are actually useful, unlike most of the ones we’ve seen thus far.

At the moment this is the most exciting for me: I can imagine web-connected screens sitting on our walls in the near future, showing the books we’re currently reading, or the ten theology books that have impacted us the most, or the ten memoirs we love the most, or whatever, to everyone who walks into our homes. If they’re built well they should offer the same, and even more, opportunities for community, and for people to learn about us from what we read, that our physical shelves try to offer now.

This will have its own issues. It will have its opportunities for creating injustice and inequity that we who care about justice will have to fight against. We’ll have to make sure that such communal experiences are available to everyone, and that we don’t create more digital divides, and that we use this to tear down other divides. But there’s opportunity here too, and perhaps far more than there’s ever been with physical books.

And this is one of the best things about design today: the oft-unexpected opportunities when the digital can reach into the physical world, and the physical can reach into the digital world, and both become better.

The article came back to my mind today because I happened to look at some sites that had won, or had been nominated, for Webby awards. Now, I haven’t paid attention to the Webbys in six or seven years, I imagine, and had mostly forgotten that they exist. It’s fascinating, really, that they still have any importance at all. Most web folks I know are in the same boat I am, and most non-web folks don’t know that they exist at all. Like Java applets, maybe.

But when I looked at these sites, I was struck by how bad they all seemed. Not that they didn’t look pretty, or have cool animations and such, but that they were terrible web design. Often they were cheesy, but almost every one of them looked like it was created to win an award, rather than to help users do something. Doesn’t matter what it was people were trying to do; I couldn’t imagine anyone sitting through the sites long enough to do it (due to data like this).

Realizing that these sites with their percentage load counters(!), long animations before things happened, and overall presence of Flash and flashiness had still managed to win awards, I realized that the Webbys (and others like them) aren’t design awards; they are style awards, and they continue to give rise to the need for that distinction that Zeldman drew these several years ago. The problem with it, as he noted, is that this makes people confuse design with style, and either they emulate style thinking it is good design, or they reject design thinking it must all be cheesy style.

None of that is new, and it’s truly shocking that we still have to have these conversations in 2012. But here’s the thing: I think it’s more damaging when this stuff continues to happen than it was seven or thirteen years ago, and it’s because of mobile.

Many web folks see Luke Wroblewski’s data posts each Monday. This one, the most recent one, indicates that we’re already dealing with 400 million activated Android devices, 365 million iOS devices that have been sold, 227 million current generation game systems (that have web access) that have been sold, and 26.7 million eReaders that have been sold. This is compared with 1 billion Microsoft Windows PCs. The daily activation numbers of Android phones alone almost double Windows 7′s daily sales.

This would all be staggering in its own right, and I think it ought to be enough to make the Webbys rethink their criteria, if not their existence.

But that’s not the only thing. People who use these devices start to get different expectations for the web. They start expecting less clutter because they don’t have time to deal with it. They start expecting faster load times because they’re on slow 3G connections or spotty WiFi ones. They get annoyed with content that isn’t available on whatever type of device they’re using, whenever they’re using it. All of this data and more is present in a glorious fashion in Luke Wroblewski’s book, Mobile First, but it’s important to note that as these things happen they change the way people expect desktop sites to work as well.

That change is one reason that so many designers are so excited about the opportunities that are being given to us by the mobile explosion. We have more data than we’ve ever had to support our assertions that we shouldn’t treat users the way we’ve too often treated them over the web’s first twenty years, and if we keep doing it we won’t have users for much longer. It’s a beautiful change that has been too long in coming to us.

But it’s still going to take a while. There are still the Webbys.

But then there are the other companies. These companies are decidedly not design companies. Maybe they are developer companies. Maybe they are sales companies. Or maybe they think they are design companies when they’re style companies, as Zeldman might say. Regardless: they are the ones, if they have the fortune of having good designers working for them, that have designers working extra hard to sell their ideas to folks to whom they don’t come naturally.

I’ve worked at more than one of these companies, ranging in size from less than ten to a few thousand. I’ve seen projects where design (visual design, interaction design, user experience design, etc.) went really well, projects where it went really badly, and projects that fell somewhere in the middle. I feel like I’ve learned one thing that holds true across all these companies, and all the departments within these companies. As I write it, it seems a bit obvious, but no one ever told me and I meet designers often that don’t know it any more than I did.

In a non-design company, good design happens to the extent that those who have authority over what gets shipped are involved from the beginning of the project.

I’ve been thinking through all my experiences and the ones I’ve witnessed, as an employee, a freelancer, and an observer of other folks, and I believe this is always true. It’s not always true in design companies, and this is because it doesn’t need to be. Design is already at the core of who they are, and it’s always going to be present when those overriding decisions are made.

But here’s what I mean, for the rest of the world. Consider a designer, or team of designers, building a large website. Maybe they do some formal usability testing, or some coffeeshop usability testing, or whatever. They know some stuff about their users. They go into a meeting with that data, and they present to everyone there what they know. To whatever extent the designers do a good job, the other folks learn about their users as well, and everyone is wiser. They propose what needs to be done differently. The project moves forward in a different way.

Maybe the designers work with some developers, some marketing people, some content people, and some sales people and a great thing is being produced. It will follow best practices, get the business goals across in a way that will match them with the goal of users, and everyone has the potential of being happy.

But consider an executive who sees this thing before it gets shipped. He or she hasn’t been in any of these meetings. He or she doesn’t know any of the information that has been shared, and doesn’t care enough about design to have a designer in the boardroom. He or she decides to change something significant, to the point that now it goes against half the usability test data and makes a feature look silly to folks outside the organization. No one stands up to him or her, because design doesn’t have room in the organization to do so.

Maybe it’s not an executive that makes the changes; maybe it’s a manager or a product owner or just someone who feels left out because he or she wasn’t in all the cool design meetings. This situation happens every day.

The reason it happens every day is that when someone has enough power to affect the results of what is being designed, he or she will want input into how it is designed. Whether this is appropriate, or beneficial to the company or the other folks on the team is all irrelevant.

That person needs to be involved at the beginning, or the quality will go down to the extent that he or she gets to make design decisions. That person needs to be sitting in front of the whiteboard with everyone else at the beginning, hearing the usability test data, learning about the best practices, and maybe most importantly, drawing silly stick figures and non-square boxes and squiggly lines on that whiteboard to get his or her points across. He or she needs to feel heard, and like his or her input is valuable.

Because it is valuable. I may sound like I just want those thoughts to get out there so the designers can move on, but that’s really not the case. These ideas are often very good, but they are not design ideas. They often get expressed as design ideas at the end of a project, and that’s the problem. They need to get expressed at the beginning, in the most visual form possible, so that the knowledge and principles that lie behind them can get out into the open, be translated into good design, and into the needs of the organization and the needs of the users.

And again, it’s to the extent that this happens that good design is able to happen. Otherwise, that good design the team is so happy about is just waiting to be overridden.

This is important to note, I think, because it has led me to specific conversations and projects with folks involved in the broader movement, and because most of the folks I’ve seen responding to all of this are either not specifically committed to nonviolence, and/or they don’t have specific relationships within the movement. Because the video is so geared toward being viral rather than comprehensive, people’s responses are understandably not all that comprehensive either.

Let me elaborate a little bit. It was 2008 when my wife and I were first fortunate to meet roadies from Invisible Children at the church we were involved with. We didn’t have many folks (even for our small community) in attendance the night they came, and because they had heard so much about our community they came just wanting to talk, rather than give a screening.¹ It was a fascinating evening I won’t forget, and after that a few of us we were able to take the roadies out to dinner.

I had known about the organization before this, but this was the first time it made a deep impact on me. I was just beginning to dream about ways that my skills and passions for web design could feed into, and be fed by, my skills and passions for ministry and activism and so on instead of just being separate things. The revelation that that was what these people were doing – the filmmakers specifically, of course, as they had been students at USC – but others who we met that night, as well. Artists and graphic designers and so on were finding ways to contribute those things in new ways.

In 2009 Invisible Children hosted The Rescue in 100 cities, an attempt to get folks to come, hang out together outside, write letters to representatives, make art, and get attention from media folks. I was able to help out a bit in Atlanta’s event, and through that I unexpectedly got to meet John Lewis, and hear his passionate words on how, yes, we should help keep children from fighting, but there should also be no wars for them to fight. But of course through all the planning and such I also got to meet other wonderful folks, hear their hearts, and be inspired by them.

In 2010, we were able to host some different roadies, and take them to dinner a few times. Two of them were Ugandans traveling around the country to tell their stories, both affected by the LRA’s violence in different ways, and both involved with Invisible Children in their country. We talked more about each other’s dreams, we heard their stories and heard about the issues in the Ugandan government, and so on.

Let me branch out a little bit from there. We’ve also been fortunate to meet/host in our apartment, Skype, or otherwise talk with lovely folks from Falling Whistles, Ember Arts, and others of the fascinating organizations that have been birthed out of or otherwise aligned with Invisible Children. I’ve also been fortunate to talk with many others from these organizations on Twitter alone.

I say all this to try to give a bit of context. I don’t live in Southern California (where many of these folks are based). I’ve never been to Africa. I don’t consider myself an activist. I’m a white, American male who tweets, reads, thinks, talks, designs, codes, buys stuff, and gives what time and money I have to things that I think fit with the heart of God for changing the world, and when I do those things I try to get to know the folks involved as much as I can. This means my perspective is indeed limited, just like everyone else’s, and thus I’m thankful for some of the other responses. I can’t (and don’t have the right to) speak to all of the issues people have raised, but I do feel like I can speak to some of them.

And here’s the thing. In the last four/five years of building these relationships and attending these events and watching these documentaries and whatever else, I’ve never heard a person say he or she wanted Joseph Kony killed. I’ve heard them talk about reconciliation, peace, justice, and share the stories of Ugandans who have learned about all of these things through the darkest of journeys.

I’ve seen them make shirts that said “We Love the LRA,” and have conversations about what that actually means. I’ve had conversations with folks wondering how to bring the principles of nonviolence shown to us by Gandhi and King into the lives of people who are not in any direct danger (read: Americans), but want to advocate for folks who are (whether Ugandans, Congolese, or others who they’ve grown to love).

On a deeper level, I’ve seen them go far beyond the issues of LRA-specific violence (which many of the critics don’t seem to realize). I’ve seen them talk about issues of colonialism and the specific role of Westerners in creating current and past situations in Uganda and the Congo, especially.² Some of them have talked about the White Man’s Burden, and their experiences with other organizations that “forgot about people.” Many of them have talked directly and often about coming alongside the folks of Uganda and the Congo, working together for mutual liberation, and they’ve really sought ways to do that. This has happened in their African programs, as well as the American ones and the ones that bring people in between the places.

None of my experiences (or those of anyone else) imply that there are not issues with Invisible Children, the Kony2012 campaign, and the organizations in their spheres of influence. I don’t doubt that there are issues (there always are, of course), but I don’t think the negative issues are necessarily the same ones that people have been talking about since the video was released. I don’t believe their issues are issues of resisting nonviolence. In this video and everywhere else, they consistently say that they don’t want Kony killed; they want him captured and sent to the ICC – this is on top of all the conversations they regularly have about nonviolence, peace, and broad definitions of justice. I also don’t believe they are issues of the white savior complex. No one there implies that the Ugandans are the sad ones being saved by the rich white people’s good ideas, and they all know that these issues (which are decades old, and often have roots in issues that are much older) might not be there at all without rich white people anyway.

Because of this, part of me thinks that the video has hurt the impressions that the intellectuals, development folks, and others who have never talked about Invisible Children before might otherwise have of the organization. It’s true that there isn’t much a full spectrum of history and such in the video (they admit this), and it’s true that the video doesn’t talk as much about many of the most beautiful parts of the organization’s existence, other than getting the attention of the United States government to try to capture Kony. One could certainly argue that this is a bad thing. But on the flip side, 70 million people have watched the video in less than five days, and a nearly unprecedented mainstream conversation about justice in Africa is taking place. Some of these people who have watched the video will go deeper, and once such an awareness starts it can change a person’s life. From my perspective, I can’t say that’s a bad thing.

1. This was Revolution Atlanta, an alternative community with a solid group of 20 or so, but an influence much bigger than that.
2. The LRA, for example, is not involved in the ongoing violence that creates materials for the electronics we buy. Thus, Invisible Children has not dealt directly with it. But Falling Whistles, an organization aligned quite closely, is dedicated entirely to peace in that situation and does not deal directly with the LRA.

I used that phone until November of 2011, when I was able to get upgrade pricing on an iPhone, and I haven’t looked back. I want to share my experiences and thoughts from this time before I forget the good and bad things about Android, as there are too few designers who have significant experience on Android. That isn’t to say that those who use Android temporarily (John Gruber, for example, or many of the folks he quotes) and then go back to iOS are not helpful, but it’s at least something of a different thing when you do it for so long.

The hardware

This, then, is the Incredible. You can see it’s certainly not a bad design, from a hardware perspective. It’s obviously borrowing a lot from that version of the iPhone (but who isn’t?), and it does have quirks that separate the two.

A big one is the presence of hardware buttons. Android seems to be gradually moving away from these, as they just don’t fit well with the long-term development of a mobile operating system. But when the Incredible was released, there were still lots of Android phones that had physical keyboards. So there’s that, and I knew this was a better alternative than any of those.

Aside from that, when I compare it with the current iPhone, the 4s, it feels very toy-like. More fragile, less well-made. This is possibly an unfair comparison, as I didn’t spend a lot of time handling anyone’s iPhone that had a comparable age, but I do think it’s worth mentioning.

But again, overall it wasn’t particularly disappointing while I was using it.

The battery

The battery on this phone deserves posts dedicated to itself. It is truly unimaginable how bad it is. I was only able to use the default battery that came with the phone for a few weeks. It would be completely drained before the end of an eight-hour workday, starting right after I had charged it overnight. This was without running WiFi, Bluetooth, leaving the GPS on, or doing significant work with it while I was at work. Maybe I’d make a couple of calls, send or receive a few texts, open up an app or two. Not heavy usage, is the point.

So because that battery was so bad, I bought a battery upgrade for $50. It made the phone a lot bulkier, as it was thicker and required a different back for the phone, but I was willing to deal with that. With the same restrictions on WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and the same typical usage throughout a day, I was usually able to get through most of the evening – the battery would end up dying around 10 or 11 pm.

But note that again: I had to keep the GPS off if I wasn’t using it to navigate somewhere specific. I had to keep WiFi off. I had to keep Bluetooth off.

Since I’ve had the iPhone 4s, I have yet to turn off the GPS, Bluetooth, or WiFi. I use the GPS functionality much more often (I’ll talk more about this further down), I use WiFi constantly when it’s available, and I use more apps at random throughout the day. As it now stands, at 10pm after a day of at least normal usage, I still have 25% of my battery left.¹

The Incredible’s battery life is so bad that it’s disgusting that it was allowed to leave testing.

The operating system

It’s rather difficult to evaluate Android on its own merits and demerits because any handset maker or carrier is allowed to, and clearly feels the need to, customize the system in any way they see fit. They fill it with apps that can’t be deleted, they customize the user interface, and so on. So this is an attempt to look at the system the way it is on the Incredible.

I’ll say this: I really like the layout of the keys on HTC’s custom keyboard. I like the way special characters (from the dot to the @ symbol and many others) are accessible by holding down a key on the main screen. It’s better, I think, than Apple’s method of going to the next page to get those items.

And of course, Android (especially when the Incredible was released) had a far better notification system than the iPhone did. It’s still better, I think, but not like it was (people have showed me the previous system).

That’s where the benefits end. The presence of Flash? Useless, annoying, and a battery killer. The other customizations from HTC? Sum them up by observing that on the default home screen, there were two clocks. Why does anyone need two clocks taking up screen space at the same time? Just because one is big and bubbly doesn’t mean it has a right to exist.

But the biggest issue I ran into were bugs. Genuine, documented-but-never-fixed-because-there-were-almost-never-updates, bugs. For example, my Incredible had an SD card in it, and it had internal storage as well. I never so much as filled up the internal storage, much less the SD card, but constantly the phone was alerting me that it was full and I wouldn’t be able to add any apps, get updates from existing apps, etc. without deleting things.

At first, this would happen every month or so, then every week or so, then every day or so, then every hour or so. Finally, I would get frustrated and delete all the data held by any app on the phone. Contacts, email, social apps, whatever. All data gone. Then I’d have peace for a month or so, after which it would start again, and then before long every hour it would be “full” again.²

Again, it’s disgusting that any company would let a device pass out of testing with a bug like that, especially knowing it would be next to impossible to fix any bugs due to Android’s insane carrier and device fragmentation.

I don’t know if this bug is as common, but I also had constant GPS issues. I spent some time in Minneapolis in August, for example. Until the day I deactivated the phone in November, the Weather and Calendar apps thought I was still there, and occasionally the Maps app did too. This was after clearing data a few times, restarting several times, and wasting time wondering why my directions were so off. This also showed itself in apps like Foursquare, but I didn’t realize this until I switched.

I’ve yet to run into a bug on the iPhone. That’s not significant yet, of course, but what is significant is that I’ve already gotten more operating system updates since I bought the iPhone than I did in the entire time I used my Incredible.

Applications

The stereotype, of course, is that the iPhone has better apps than Android. For the most part this is true, but I want to give credit where credit is due and look at the exceptions.

Google Apps

Google apps, as you’d expect, are really good on Android. The Gmail app shines, and is (I think) better than any mail app I’ve used on the iPhone so far. The Google Reader app is very good (though there are apps that far outshine it on the iPhone – Flipboard especially). Google Maps is very good, and Google’s Navigation app is even better (and, of course, not available for iPhone).

But for me, that’s pretty much it. I thought I’d miss Google’s apps when I switched to the iPhone, but the only one I miss is Gmail (but when the Gmail app for iPhone gets multiple account support, I’ll be happy). Flipboard is amazing to the point that I don’t ever use Google Reader on the iPhone. And Google’s Navigation app is, for me, overcome by Waze.³

Non-Google Apps

Now, there were some nice other apps on Android, but the thing is this: all of them are as nice or better on the iPhone. Things like Mint, Facebook, Twitter (and the myriad of other Twitter apps – each one beats anything available on Android), Foursquare (maybe due to the GPS issues I mentioned earlier), Scoutmmob, NPR, WordPress, etc. are far better in every way on the iPhone than they are on Android. Then there are the countless apps that are available only on the iPhone, and this is where the stereotype is most true. The iPhone just has better apps, and it has more better apps.

Many folks think, of course, that this is because developers like iOS better. I think this is true. I also think it’s true that very few, if any, designers have any inclination to work on Android apps, and thus they all end up getting created by developers. Case in point is a crazy brilliant little app that only runs on Android called Tasker. When I first bought it, it was $6, but it seemed so great that I didn’t have an issue with that.

In essence, it allows you to automate almost anything the phone can do. The phone can turn on WiFi when you reach a certain location, turn it off when you leave, turn on the GPS when you open certain apps, turn it off when you close them, silence itself at bedtime, turn the sound back on in the morning, and any number of other things. It truly can do almost anything you can imagine.

But here’s the thing: you basically have to be a programmer to do things with it, or to read its documentation. This is because it was created by a Java developer. A brilliant Java developer, no doubt, but still a Java developer. Not a designer, and not a person who understands how users think.

And that’s the essence of Android apps, from my perspective. If they aren’t matched or outmatched by equivalents on the iPhone, they just aren’t designed well for people to use them, even if they have amazing functionality. I’ve long been clear that design isn’t about making things pretty, but it is about letting people do what they need to do.

Overall

So the overall experience I had with Android is terrible when compared with the experience Android users could and should get, or when compared with the one that iPhone users get. The reason for this is that Google isn’t interested in the attention to overall quality first, and specific details second, that Apple is. They seem to be taking tiny steps in that direction with some of their devices, but everything I’ve seen of their current models suggests that even now, the two companies could not be more different in the ways they approach their systems.

As a designer, then, I couldn’t recommend an Android phone of any kind to anyone, unless it was for device testing, development, or other professional use.

1. And again, this is the iPhone 4s. The one that most people say has worse battery life than the previous version, and the one on which Apple says it has been working out battery life bugs.
2. Most people I know who had Incredibles also had this issue. But not all of them, and that’s maddening, but it was a documented bug that Google, HTC, and/or Verizon chose never to do anything about. It’s still happening to my friends that have Incredibles today.
3. This lovely free app not only does turn-by-turn navigation like Gooogle’s Navigation app, but it also changes directions for you based on public traffic data, road conditions data, and the social data it gathers from its other users to give you a faster drive to wherever it is you are going. I haven’t missed Google’s app since I installed this one, and it regularly saves me time, even on a daily drive like my commute to work.

If you make stuff for websites, take the survey. It’s an important part of what you do.

The really interesting thing to me about this is the unique opportunity it gives us, as web designers or UX designers or whatever, to be the connection between people and fields that typically don’t understand each other at all. Let me elaborate.

One of the stereotypes about technology people – whether they are hardware people, tech support people, engineers or programmers, or whatever – is that they can’t communicate well with non-technical people. This stereotype isn’t always true, of course, but it often is true. Sometimes this is because they genuinely don’t know how to express the concepts they’re discussing in non-technical ways, and sometimes it’s a more ideological attempt to keep people from challenging their established positions (and it often works, because those they’re communicating with don’t have the language resources with which to challenge).

Designers usually don’t fall into this specific stereotype (we have our own issues, of course). Sometimes this is because designers are not that technical, but as we’ve learned from Zeldman and others, good web designers write code, and they understand programming as well. They understand what web servers and databases and programming languages are capable of doing, and some degree of how to do that stuff, because that’s how their designs get accomplished.

Good web designers also understand user experience design. Whether they are UX designers themselves or not (I don’t want to get into the battle over titles) is irrelevant – all good web designers know how user experience affects their work, and how their work affects user experience. They know what it means for something to be intuitive, and what their role is in that.

It’s the combination of these things – an understanding of technical stuff and an understanding of user experience – that gives us as designers the opportunity I’m speaking of, and it’s the opportunity to be the connection between technical people and non-technical people. To the extent that we do this, the stuff we all make together gets better, and that’s a beautiful thing that happens too infrequently. But it’s also true that to the extent we do this, we become better designers.

Building better stuff

Designers who are able to be a bridge between technical and non-technical people will always be an enhancement to web projects, beyond the obvious stuff that we do as part of designing things. We are able to translate what is actually being said by each group in meaningful ways.

When this happens, technical people understand why it is that the non-technical people want or do not want something, and non-technical people understand why it is that the technical people want or do not want something. Understanding that, on both sides, makes it easier to say “No” when it’s necessary, instead of getting bogged down in jargon, on both sides, that obscures whether or not something is actually good for a project.

When it doesn’t happen, technical people feel attacked, or like no one understands what it really takes to accomplish something. This leads to unrealistic stuff that gets done badly. Equally important, non-technical people feel stupid. If you’ve ever been part of these conversations, you’ve heard someone ask you to “explain it to me like I’m stupid.” But that’s not really what they want. What they really want is for you to explain it in their own language, or in a language that makes sense to them, and designers are uniquely qualified to do this.

Granted, it can be difficult for a designer to get into this space. Often it’s hard for technical people to really trust a designer, but it is possible, especially when designers really do understand what the technical issues are and what they mean. Designers can be the people who make those translations make sense, and they can do it in a way that doesn’t make anyone feel stupid or attacked. It’s worth it; it makes better stuff.

Becoming better designers

It’s also true that designers who are able to function in this role will, in an overall sense, become better designers.

The reason for this is that the skills we use in these roles are the skills we use when we actually design things. One role creates, and inspires, the other role.

Most businesses have their own language. They have their own acronyms, their own internal structures of things, and their own ways of understanding whatever it is that they do. Developing this language is natural, and it can help make it possible for people to function within large organizations. But the problem is that these languages don’t make any sense. They themselves are not natural, and people don’t understand them without being stuck in the organizations.

So, most of the time when we’re designing something, we’re not designing it for the people within our organizations who already understand that language. This makes most design projects fairly complex, even if they otherwise wouldn’t be, because we have to avoid making people feel stupid. They’re not stupid, in all likelihood; they just need to hear stuff in their own language, or one that they understand.

But again, it gives us as designers the unique opportunity to communicate between people who understand the language of that business and people who just want to buy something, or use something, or get something done.

To do this, we need to understand what languages it is that the organization uses, and why it uses them. It’s hard work to do this. But we also have to understand what languages it is that users understand, and this gives us the chance to get to know them.

Doing these things is worth it. It makes better stuff, and it makes better designers.