Subtraction.com

Requiem for the Browser Search Box

2012-02-23T10:24:41-05:00

The changes promised in Apple’s forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion release look promising on the whole, but there’s one that makes me sad: the next major version of Safari will sport a unified address bar. Instead of two fields, one for the URL and one for search, Macworld writes that “the browser now sports a single lengthy field that can be used to type in a URL; pull up the top result in your selected search engine from a keyword or search the Web, your bookmarks and history, or within the page itself.”

Though I spend most of my time using Firefox, which still has both an address bar and a search box, I also spend a fair amount of time using Chrome which of course, popularized the concept of the unified search bar in the first place. I find the unified search bar to be a fine complement to the way I use my browser, but I still stubbornly prefer two fields up there.

Search Me

Many people don’t agree, but I find that second search field to be incredibly useful. I frequently use it to ‘park’ search terms, so I can browse search results freely and then quickly return to the original query and even edit it. And, again unlike many people, I make frequent use of the specific search ‘engines’ available under that field — both ones that ship with the browser and ones that you can add yourself. Being able to scope a query specifically to Amazon, IMDB or Netflix is very useful.

However, it’s clear that this is becoming an outmoded use case for browsing. The unified search bar is the current paradigm, just as the segregated search field was in its day. In fact, from what I understand, Firefox, which originally popularized the segregated search field, is contemplating the unified search bar as well.

Though I feel quite wedded to that search field, I’m sure once it’s gone I’ll adjust just fine. It feels ingrained, but if Apple has shown us anything, it’s that the way we use computing technology is much more fluid and temporary than we might believe. We all get invested in particular ways of doing things, specific features and workflows that we think we can’t live without, but of course in the end this is all changing so fast that such habits are practically ephemeral. We adapt and move on, which I think is a good thing.

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Getting Airlines off the Ground

2012-02-22T09:09:56-05:00

Over the weekend my family took a short trip by plane. The experience of flying — which I never enjoy — was so bad, it made me despair again for this incompetent industry that we all seem to be stuck with but have little recourse from. The ineptitudes of nearly every airline’s customer experience just boggle the mind and make me marvel at the fact that they can even exist as businesses.

Proposal for an Amazing New Business

How outlandish would it be, it made me wonder, if you tried to get a business started today that adhered to the same logic that dictates the airline industry? You wouldn’t get very far, but I thought it would be entertaining to describe such a hypothetical business just to hear how ridiculous it would sound.

Here are the positives: this is an amazing new service that connects people in truly meaningful ways, at a level that no other product or service can match. The target market is, well, everybody; it’s good for consumers and it’s good for businesses; it’s good for individuals and it’s good for groups; it’s good for young and it’s good for old; it’s good for people of lower incomes and it’s good for people of higher incomes. There’s really nothing quite like this.

Of course, there are a few catches. First, while the technology is of the highest quality, there’s no guarantee that you will always be connected. Of course, the business will endeavor to make successful connections, but about ten or twenty percent of the time it will either fail, or the service will take much longer than promised.

Also, if you use this service to send any attachments, there’s a small but decent chance that they won’t be successfully transmitted, or that the attachments will end up going to someone else. Also, in most cases it will cost you US$25 per attachment.

Security will be a big part of this service. In order to guarantee its integrity, you’ll need to provide more than just a user name and password, as those are too trivially spoofed. Rather, some kind of government-issued identification will be required — not just to sign up, but each time you use the service. And, unfortunately, be forewarned that authenticating each use is going to be a little laborious and may occassionally slow down the service’s performance noticeably.

There’s a big opportunity to think of this service as a kind of platform, meaning other businesses can build on top of it and deliver their products and goods through it. While a consumer is engaged with the service, he or she will be able to get immediate access to only those vendors who have been approved to operate within the service. As a result, prices are likely to be twenty or thirty percent higher than they would be otherwise. Unfortunately, in spite of the increased prices, in most cases the quality of the vendors’ products will be lower.

Additionally, while you use the service, there will be certain times when you will be asked not to use other technology products. The reason is that other technology products might interfere with its operation. No empirical proof really exists that that’s the case, but still the restrictions will stand.

As for pricing, each connection will cost a few hundred dollars, and as much as a thousand dollars or more, too. The exact pricing will actually be quite variable depending not just on the availability and demand of the connection you’re trying to make but also on when you make your purchase. What it costs today may be less than what it costs tomorrow, or, under certain conditions (that will not be disclosed), what it costs today may be more than what it costs tomorrow. Also, in most cases the cost will be non-refundable and non-transferrable. Sorry.

Clearly I’ve used some selective embellishment here to make for a more entertaining pitch, but I think the gist is still right: if the airline business did not exist today and someone proposed building it in the way that we know it to be, no one would stand for it.

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InVision Prototyping Tool Feed Sponsorship

2012-02-17T00:00:00-05:00

The UI prototyping phase of the design process is crucial to get right. It’s about figuring out how your product will work, and ensuring everyone is aligned before moving into building.

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Some Generalizing about Specializing

2012-02-16T12:21:25-05:00

When I worked at The New York Times, I used to have friendly arguments with a colleague about the role of information architects on a digital design team. The debate was over the things that an information architect does — evaluating goals, planning features, constructing wireframes — were things that should be the purview of visual designers instead. We would go back and forth over the usefulness of dividing these responsibilities, segregating the nitty gritty planning from the visual execution. Put another way, the question was whether the information architect was even necessary?

I invariably argued in favor of information architects because I’ve always felt that there is a significant population of talented designers and thinkers who can envision, plan and manage a user experience design solution even in spite of their inability to render the user interface itself in Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML etc. What’s more, there are lots of visual designers of the ‘heads down’ type, who are superb craftspeople but are not very adept at the holistic thinking necessary to plan out the entirety of a user experience, or capable of the articulation necessary to convince others of a particular UX strategy.

Things seem to be changing. For one, the term “information architect” seems to have gone out of style. What I hear a lot more these days is “user experience designer.” Now, I dislike few things as much as debating the semantics of these particular job titles, but it does strike me that part of the shift to this nomenclature has to do with the fact that, more and more, what employers want is a single person who can do both the feature planning and the visual execution.

Digital Design Grows Up

A pretty healthy number of employers — both startups and established companies — ask me for referrals to talented people. Even with other sectors of the economy still struggling back to their feet, there seems to be a lot of really interesting work out there if you are an experienced digital designer. But in almost every case, these companies are looking to hire someone who is both information architect and visual designer (and they most often refer to this role as ‘user experience designer’). I’ve tried to recommend information architects to many of them, but they almost aways prefer someone with visual design skills as well.

I think what we’re seeing is maturation in the industry. That’s kind of counter-intuitive to say, because you would think that the more natural progression would be from generalists to specialists, but what I’m describing here is the reverse: a move away from specialists and toward generalists.

Actually, I believe it’s a move back to generalists. The very early days of the Web were the domain of folks who could do everything. But in the late 1990s the ecosystem assumed new complexity with such rapidity that it necessitated a workforce of specialists just to cope with the newness of all its myriad components.

Now, things have swung around the other way. The technology remains complex, of course, but it’s been successfully abstracted enough that it’s once again possible for a single person to create a very robust product, and for just a small handful of people to create a very robust company. And accordingly this has also become what the market expects; big company budgets are shrinking, and startup investors are expecting more out of smaller teams. That makes specialists look more expensive than they have in the past.

There will of course always be some room for specialists, especially in large enterprises, so I’m certainly not predicting a desolate future for those whose skills are highly focused. Extremely talented people will always find a way forward, so long as they remain flexible. But it does seem evident to me that, more and more, if you call yourself a digital designer, it behooves you to be a visual designer as much as anything else. What’s more, there are so few of these fully versatile designers out there that if you are indeed one of these people, you’re more or less free to write your own ticket.

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Tumble-blogging at Subtraction.com

2012-02-10T11:07:38-05:00

For the past week or so, I’ve been playing with a slightly different kind of content here at Subtraction.com. This is something I talked about in a recent post in which I rambled on about the state of several different blog tools; I’m now experimenting with Tumblr-style image blogging that in most cases is purely about the image, with only a short line of additional text, if any. Here’s one example. (There are still some kinks to be worked out, so bear with me.)

This might seem unremarkable to regular readers since I already publish short, image-heavy, posts with just a bit of text. On the back-end though, it’s quite different, or at least meaningfully different. With the help of my friend Adam Khan, we’ve customized an ExpressionEngine ‘channel’ that presents a much more succinct publishing interface than the one I normally use. In essence, there are fewer fields to fill out and the fields themselves are physically smaller, which dissuades me from writing at any great length. On top of that, we’ve cooked up a bookmarklet that drives a simple script for grabbing images and auto-populating the forms, so creating a new post when I come across something I like only takes a few clicks.

None of this is novel in the least, as plenty of Web apps already do this much better than what we cooked up in an ad hoc fashion. But it’s long been a struggle for me to post here as regularly as I’d like, especially as my schedule just keeps getting busier and busier, so anything that makes it easier for me is something worth experimenting with. It’s also a useful reminder that interface design does matter — having a simpler, more concise publishing U.I. directly influences the kind of content that gets produced.

To be clear, this does not mean I’m giving up on posting longer pieces of real writing here. I still enjoy that a great deal; it’s just a matter of finding the time. Hopefully this supplemental style of blogging will help fill the void, but if you have any thoughts on how successful — or unsuccessful — it is, please let me know in the comments.

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kooaba Shortcut Feed Sponsorship

2012-02-08T00:00:00-05:00

kooaba Shortcut is a shortcut between real life and the Internet: take a picture of what you are reading in a newspaper or magazine and instantly get connected to the digital version.

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Déjà Vu Feed Sponsorship

2012-02-02T00:00:00-05:00

Déjà Vu is your visual memory. Use the app by taking pictures of things you would like to remember. For example, products you see in a magazine, recipes you read in a cooking book, wine labels in a restaurant, Newspaper article, DVDs, CDs or event flyers. Each picture is a visual memo. A regular camera app doesn’t distinguish those photos of stuff from “regular“ photos. Déjà Vu helps people organize and structure their visual memos in an easy and effective way. It does this by a tailored interface for tagging and categorization and integration of image recognition technology.

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Rambling Thoughts on Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous, Pinterest and Blogging

2012-01-27T14:28:59-05:00

We just relaunched the Mixel blog yesterday along with a refresh of our main Web site. The main goal was to bring the look and feel of both in line with one another and, specifically for the blog, to create a more editorial-friendly presentation. As I explained in this post, the Mixel blog turned out to be a more text-intensive product than we anticipated, and so we needed a design that would accommodate that. We also needed to switch to a publishing tool that was more suitable for that kind of content. Tumblr wasn’t doing it for us.

I wrote about Tumblr a while ago with great admiration in this blog post, and I still think it’s an amazing company and one of the best social content products out there. As a ‘traditional’ blogging tool though, I’m more ambivalent about it.

The Writing Kind of Blogging

It’s true that many folks, like my friend Cameron Moll, use Tumblr to publish their text-heavy blogs and are very happy with it, and so I don’t argue that it can work great for this purpose. But we found it to be less reliable than we’d like; the editing interface is unpredictable, to put it politely.

To be fair, we were also using it in a way that wasn’t a truly good fit for what Tumblr is good at; the first rule of digital content is that it must be true to the native characteristics of its delivery channel, and we weren’t doing that. We’re not giving up on Tumblr though; its network effects are truly amazing, and we have some ideas for a different editorial product that will hopefully be a much better fit for that network.

In place of Tumblr, we’re now using a WordPress blog hosted over at Page.ly. The theme was developed by my friend and amazing WordPress guru Allan Cole. In spite of having developed a premium WordPress theme of my own (Basic Maths, which was designed and developed with Allan), I’ve never been a heavy WordPress user until now. I have to admit, its most recent version is full of the fun, geeky features that I like as a blogger, stuff that allows designer-editors to fully tweak the way content is output. It’s great.

MindNode Feed Sponsorship

2012-01-26T00:00:00-05:00

MindNode is an elegant, easy-to-use mind mapping tool for Mac and iOS. Whether you’re brainstorming for your next project, organizing your life, or planning your vacation, MindNode lets you collect, structure, and expand your ideas. And thanks to built-in Dropbox and WiFi sharing, even your biggest ideas can go anywhere your iPhone does.

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Scrivener Feed Sponsorship

2012-01-19T00:00:00-05:00

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Subtraction.com

Requiem for the Browser Search Box

Search Me

Getting Airlines off the Ground

Proposal for an Amazing New Business

InVision Prototyping Tool Feed Sponsorship

Some Generalizing about Specializing

Digital Design Grows Up

Tumble-blogging at Subtraction.com

kooaba Shortcut Feed Sponsorship

Déjà Vu Feed Sponsorship

Rambling Thoughts on Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous, Pinterest and Blogging

The Writing Kind of Blogging

Other Stuff Posted at Other Places

MindNode Feed Sponsorship

Scrivener Feed Sponsorship