Archive: On this day

Spring sprung last weekend. Saturday was an unseasonably nice and sunny day, so Jessica and I decided to make the most of it with a walk in the countryside.

Our route took us from Woodingdean to Lewes. Woodingdean isn’t too far away from where we live, but the walk there would’ve been beside a busy road so we just took the bus for that portion.

Being on the bus means we didn’t stop to take note of an interesting location. Just outside the Nuffield hospital is the unassuming opening of the Woodingdean Water Well. This is the deepest hand-dug well in the world—deeper than the Empire State Building is tall—dug over the course of four years in the mid nineteenth century. I didn’t even know of its existence until Brian told me about it.

From Woodingdean, we walked along Juggs Road. Originally a Roman ridgeway, it was named for the fishwives travelling from Brighton to Lewes with their marine wares. This route took us over Newmarket Hill, the site of many mock battles in the 18th century, for the amusement of the royals on a day out from the Pavilion.

Walking through Kingston, we came to the Ashcombe Windmill, where I pet a nice horsey.

Then it was on into Lewes, where we could admire the handsome architecture of Lewes Cathedral …the local wags’ name for Harveys Brewery. Thanks to Ben’s connections, Clearleft managed to get a behind-the-scenes tour of this Victorian marvel a few months ago.

This time round, there would be no brewery tour, but that’s okay—there’s a shop right outside. We chose an appropriate ale to accompany a picnic of pork pie and apple.

Having walked all the way to Lewes, it would’ve been a shame to return empty-handed, so before getting the bus back to Brighton, we popped into Mays Farm Cart and purchased a magnificent forerib of beef straight from the farm.

‘Twas a most worthwhile day out.

Chris put together a terrific round-up of posts recently called Simple & Boring. It links off to a number of great articles on the topic of complexity (and simplicity) in web development.

I had linked to quite a few of the articles myself already, but one I hadn’t seen was from David DeSandro who wrote New tech gets chatter:

You don’t hear about TextMate because TextMate is old. What would I tweet? Still using TextMate. Still good.

I think that’s a very good point.

It’s relatively easy to write and speak about new technologies. You’re excited about them, and there’s probably an eager audience who can learn from what you have to say.

It’s trickier to write something insightful about a tried and trusted (perhaps even boring) technology that’s been around for a while. You could maybe write little tips and tricks, but I bet your inner critic would tell you that nobody’s interested in hearing about that old tech. It’s boring.

The result is that what’s being written about is not a reflection of what’s being widely used. And that’s okay …as long as you know that’s the case. But I worry that theres’s a perception problem. Because of the outsize weighting of new and exciting technologies, a typical developer could feel that their skills are out of date and the technologies they’re using are passé …even if those technologies are actually in wide use.

I don’t know about you, but I constantly feel like I’m behind the curve because I’m not currently using TypeScript or GraphQL or React. Those are all interesting technologies, to be sure, but the time to pick any of them up is when they solve a specific problem I’m having. Learning a new technology just to mitigate a fear of missing out isn’t a scalable strategy. It’s reasonable to investigate a technology because you genuinely think it’s exciting; it’s quite another matter to feel like you must investigate a technology in order to survive. That way lies burn-out.

I find it very grounding to talk to Drew and Rachel about the people using their Perch CMS product. These are working developers, but they are far removed from the world of tools and frameworks forged in the startup world.

In a recent (excellent) article comparing the performance of Formula One websites, Jake made this observation at the end:

However, none of the teams used any of the big modern frameworks. They’re mostly Wordpress & Drupal, with a lot of jQuery. It makes me feel like I’ve been in a bubble in terms of the technologies that make up the bulk of the web.

I think this is very astute. I also think it’s completely understandable to form ideas about what matters to developers by looking at what’s being discussed on Twitter, what’s being starred on Github, what’s being spoken about at conferences, and what’s being written about on Ev’s blog. But it worries me when I see browser devrel teams focusing their efforts on what appears to be the needs of typical developers based on the amount of ink spilled and breath expelled.

I have a suspicion that there’s a silent majority of developers who are working with “boring” technologies on “boring” products in “boring” industries …you know, healthcare, government, education, and other facets of everyday life that any other industry would value more highly than Uber for dogs.

Trys wrote a great blog post called City life, where he compares his experience of doing CMS-driven agency work with his experience working at a startup in Shoreditch:

I was chatting to one of the team about my previous role. “I built two websites a month in WordPress”.

They laughed… “WordPress! Who uses that anymore?!”

Nearly a third of the web as it turns out - but maybe not on the Silicon Roundabout.

I’m not necessarily suggesting that there should be more articles and talks about older, more established technologies. Conferences in particular are supposed to give audiences a taste of what’s coming—they can be a great way of quickly finding out what’s exciting in the world of development. But we shouldn’t feel bad if those topics don’t match our day-to-day reality.

Ultimately what matters is building something—a website, a web app, whatever—that best serves end users. If that requires a new and exciting technology, that’s great. But if it requires an old and boring technology, that’s also great. What matters here is appropriateness.

When we’re evaluating technologies for appropriateness, I hope that we will do so through the lens of what’s best for users, not what we feel compelled to use based on a gnawing sense of irrelevancy driven by the perceived popularity of newer technologies.

Time for even more CSS goodness at An Event Apart Seattle (Special Edition). Eric’s talk is called Fit For Purpose: Making Sense of the New CSS. Here are my notes…

Eric isn’t going to dive quite as deeply as Rachel, but he is going to share some patterns he has used.

Feature queries

First up: feature queries! Or @supports, if you prefer. You can ask a browser “do you support this feature?” If you haven’t used feature queries, you might be wondering why you have to say the property and the value. Well, think about it. If you asked a browser “do you support display?”, it’s not very useful. So you have to say “do you support display: grid?”

Here’s a nice pattern from Lea Verou for detecting support for custom properties:

@supports (--css: variables)

Here’s a gotcha:

@supports (clip-path: polygon())

That won’t work because polygon() is invalid. This will work:

@supports (clip-path: polygon(0 0))

So to use feature queries, you need to understand valid values for properties.

You can chain feature queries together, or just pick the least-supported thing you’re testing for and test just for that.

Here’s a pattern Eric used when he only wanted to make text sideways, but only if grid is supported:

@supports (display: grid) {
    ...
    @supports (writing-mode: sideways-lr) {
        ...
    }
}

That’s functionally equivalent to:

@supports (display: grid) {
    ...
}
@supports (display:grid) and (writing-mode: sideways-lr) {
    ...
}

Choose whichever pattern makes sense to you. More to the point, choose the pattern that makes sense to your future self when you revisit your code.

Feature queries need to work together with media queries. Sometimes there are effects that you only want to apply on larger viewports. Do you put your feature queries inside your media queries? Or do you put your media queries inside your feature queries?

• MOSS: Media Outside Support Statements
• MISO: Media Inside Supports Object

Use MOSS when you have more media switches than support blocks. Use MISO when you only have a few breakpoints but lots of feature queries.

That’s one idea that Eric has. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.

And remember, CSS is still CSS. Sometimes you don’t need a feature query at all. You could just use hanging-punctuation without testing for it. Browsers that don’t understand it will just ignore it. CSS has implicit feature queries built in. You don’t have to put your grid layout in a feature query, but you might want to put grid-specific margins and widths inside a feature query for display: grid.

Feature queries really help us get from now to the future.

Flexbox

Let’s move on to flexbox. Flexbox is great for things in a line.

On the An Event Apart site, the profile pictures have social media icons lined up at the bottom. Sometimes there are just a few. Sometimes there are a lot more. This is using flexbox. Why? Because it’s cool. Also, because it’s flexbox, you can create rules about how the icons should behave if one of the icons is taller than the others. (It’s gotten to the point that Eric has forgotten that vertically-centring things in CSS is supposed to be hard. The jokes aren’t funny any more.) Also, what if there’s no photo? Using flexbox, you can say “if there’s no photo, change the direction of the icons to be vertical.” Once again, it’s all about writing less CSS.

Also, note that the profile picture is being floated. That’s the right tool for the job. It feels almost transgressive to use float for exactly the purpose for which it was intended.

On the An Event Apart site, the header is currently using absolute positioning to pull the navigation from the bottom of the page source to the top of the viewport. But now you get overlap at some screen sizes. Flexbox would make it much more robust. (Eric uses the flexbox inspector in Firefox Nightly to demonstrate.)

With flexbox, what works horizontally works vertically. Flexbox allows you to align things, as long as you’re aligning in one direction. Flexbox makes things springy. Everything’s related and pushing against each other in a way that makes sense for this medium. It’s intuitive, even though it takes a bit of getting used to …because we’ve picked up some bad habits. To quote Yoda, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” A lot of the barrier is getting over what we’ve internalised. Eric envies the people starting out now. They get to start fresh. It’s like when people who never had to table layouts see code from that time period: it (quite rightly) doesn’t make any sense. That’s what it’s going to be like when people starting out today see the float-based layouts from Bootstrap and the like.

Grid

That’s going to happen with grid too. We must unlearn what we have learned from twenty years of floats and positioning. What makes it worth is:

1. Flexbox and grid are pretty easy to get used to, and
2. It’s amazing what you can do!

Eric quotes from an article called How We adopted CSS Grid at Scale:

…we agreed to use CSS Grid at the layout level and Flexbox at the component level (arranging child items of components). Although there’s some overlap and in some cases both could be used interchangeably, abiding by this rule helped us avoid any confusion in gray areas.

Don’t be afraid to set these kind of arbitrary limits that aren’t technological, but are necessary for the team to work well together.

Eric hacked his Wordpress admin interface to use grid instead of floats for an activity component (a list of dates and titles). He initially turned each list item into a separate grid. The overall list didn’t look right. What Eric really needed was a subgrid capability, so that the mini grids (the list items) would relate to one another within the larger grid (the list). But subgrid doesn’t exist yet.

In this case, there’s a way to fake it using display: contents. Eric made the list a grid and used display: contents on the list items. It’s as though you’re saying that the contents of the li are really the contents of the ul. That works in this particular case.

The feature queries for that looked like:

@supports (display: grid) {
    ...
    @supports (display: contents) {
        ...
    }
}

Eric is also using the grid “ASCII art” (named areas) technique on his personal site. This works independent of source order. For that reason, make sure your source order makes sense.

Using media queries, Eric defines entirely different layouts simply by using different ASCII art. He’s switching templates.

For a proposed redesign of the An Event Apart site, Eric used CSS grid as a prototyping tool. He took a PDF, sliced it up, exported JPGs, and then used grid to lay out those images in a flexible grid. Rapid prototyping! The Firefox grid inspector really helps here. In less than an hour, he had a working layout. He could test whether the layout was sensible and robust. Then he swapped out the sliced images for real content. That took maybe another hour (mostly because it was faster to re-type the text than try to copy and paste from a PDF). CSS makes it that damn easy now!

So even if you’re not going to put things like grid into production, they can still be enormously useful as design tools (and you’re getting to grips with this new stuff).

See also:

• Torre’s notes from this talk.

It’s time for a gridtastic afternoon at An Event Apart Seattle (Special Edition). Kicking it off is Rachel with her talk Graduating to Grid. Here are my notes…

When Rachel spoke at An Event Apart last year, grid layout was still on the horizon. Then in March 2017, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox all shipped within weeks of one another. Then at An Event Apart Seattle last year, Edge announced that they were shipping too. So within a very short time, CSS grid got really good browser support.

What’s it like being in the middle of a launch of a big new CSS feature? Very quickly, we had 90% browser support. Suddenly it wasn’t just Jen and Rachel talking about grid—everyone was talking about grid. It involved a lot of email. Alas, Rachel couldn’t answer all those questions (she has a job, after all) but she did start collecting those questions. She found that people were excited, confused, and scared. So much to learn!

Rachel put out a survey and asked “How do you feel when a new CSS feature is announced?” Responses included “Oh, no!” and “Tired.” Some of us in the audience can, no doubt, identify with that.

People started emailing Rachel asking for her blessing. Were they doing the right thing? But Rachel can’t tell you what to do. She’s not in your situation. But she can help you develop the skills to make those decisions yourself. She can offer you confidence. She wants everyone to be the amazing CSS layout person on their team. That’s what this talk is for.

First of all, you need to understand CSS. There’s no shortcut here. But that doesn’t mean you need to learn every single property and value by heart. That’s not what CSS is about. That’s like learning phrases in a foreign language—knowing the words for “coffee” or “beer” doesn’t help you grok the language. It’s the same for CSS. There are some core ideas that help CSS layout make sense. You probably have an understanding of them already, but maybe you don’t have the right words for them.

At the heart of this is the first word in the language we’re talking about: cascading. You need to understand the (much-maligned) cascade. And you can’t talk about the cascade without encountering specificity. The MDN page on the cascade and specificity is a good explanation.

Then there’s dimensions. In any language with a horizontal writing mode, the inline dimension runs left to right or right to left, and the block dimension runs down the page from top to bottom. In vertical writing mode, it’s different.

In grid, we talk about the inline axis as rows, and the block axis as columns.

Sizing matters. It has become obvious that no one understands how big anything is. We’re living in a world where you don’t control the size of things.

In older float-based systems, everything is given a percentage. As long as our percentages don’t exceed 100%, everything’s okay. And we’ve got wrappers to keep things within rows. We end up with something that looks like a grid. It involves us doing a lot of calculating. You can do this with flexbox too, but it’s much the same—figuring out percentages. These past layout methods create the appearance of a grid by lining things up.

With the new layout, we don’t have to do the calculations. We need to understand CSS intrinsic sizing and extrinsic sizing (say that ten times fast).

With a regular div, you’ve got a block-level element. The box will stretch as far as it will go, to the viewport width by default. You can specify an intrinsic size by saying, say, width: 500px. That makes 500 pixels wide in the inline direction.

However the content of the box has a size. The maximum size of a string of text is how much space it would take up if it never wrapped. The minimum size is the space it would take up if everything wrapped. Now in CSS we can say width: min-content or width: max-content.

Let’s say our div was in a container that had a width of 20em. The max-content of the contents of the div (which is more than 20 ems) is wider than the width of the div and so the content overflows.

In flexbox, let’s say we’ve got a flex container with four items and we’ve declared that each one should take up max-content. Each item takes up as much space as it needs. Each one uses max-content as its starting point, and then width is removed to make all four items fit in the container. flex: 1 1 auto will distribute space according to the content. flex: 1 1 0 will distribute the space equally (you’re effectively saying that the max-content is zero).

It’s similar with grid layout but with slight differences. Flexbox is starting from max-content and taking space away. Grid is starting from min-content and adding space.

Those content keywords aren’t well supported outside grid layout. They’re safe to use for track sizing.

grid-template-columns: repeat(4, min-content);

That will make everything squished down.

grid-template-columns: repeat(4, max-content);

That one will probably cause an overflow.

grid-template-columns: repeat(4, fit-content(15ch));

That one will make 15 characters an upper limit!

You can make a grid layout using fr units and grid-gap. No need for figuring out percentages. You can use percentages if you like though. You can use percentages for gaps, for example.

Remember, you don’t have to stick with a twelve column grid. Slack started with that because it was what they were used to. Then they realised they didn’t have to.

Imagine a media object pattern, where you don’t want the image to ever be bigger than 300 pixels.

grid-template-columns: fit-content(300px) 1fr

As Rachel creates more layouts with grid, she finds she’s using less and less CSS, which is great. The browser is doing the work. That matches the reality of the situation where you don’t know the size of your content in advance—long titles, and so on.

This is not exciting. But it will let you do exciting things. Learning about sizing is the CSS equivalent of eating your vegetables or getting enough sleep.

“Why is all of this so complicated?”, is something Rachel hears a lot. It’s like all software. People want all the features, and they also want it to be easy to use.

More capability and flexibility means more to learn. But it’s worth remembering that you don’t have to learn everything at once. Once you switch your mindset to the grid way of thinking (where you define things on the layout) it gets easier. It’s all just lines.

If you name your grid lines, e.g. “content-start” and “content-end”, you automatically get a named area called “content.”

It works the other way around too. If you create an area called “content”, you automatically get lines named “content-start” and “content-end”.

You don’t have to use any of that. You have real choice for the first time.

A lot of the assumptions we’ve had in the past about what isn’t possible don’t hold up any more. You can now ask, “what’s the best way to do this?” instead of asking “which patterns does our framework give us?”

Well, that’s fine, you might be thinking, for shiny new things. But what if you’re building things that have an old codebase? Rachel asked “How old is the oldest CSS in your project?” in her survey. People have code that’s over ten years old. But old CSS in your codebase doesn’t mean you can’t use new CSS. You can design components or a section of a page using a new technique. This is where understanding CSS comes in really useful—the cascade, especially.

Rachel shows an example of a page made with Bootstrap. She drops a grid component into that layout. It works fine. Nothing explodes. They coexist side by side.

You can create systems with new layout. You’ve got a lot of choice. You can start to make decisions about which layout method works best for different situation. Other layout methods still exist. Don’t try to recreate floats within grid—just use floats. It’s like when we moved from tables for layout, some people went too far and stopped using tables for tabular data. If you need content to flow around an element, float that element. Likewise, if you’re doing layout in just one dimension, you don’t have to use grid; use flexbox.

Off-the-shelf frameworks are designed to solve generic problems. We end up solving problems we don’t have. Do you want your project to inherit the CSS problems of the rest of the world? Solving your specific problems only will result in lighter, easier to understand code.

You don’t need to lean on somebody else’s framework to get reusable code for your project and your team.

What about working with less capable browsers? (these may not always be old browsers). Let’s go back to 2006 and Yahoo’s graded browser support matrix. It was updated quarterly. It was useful. A lot of discussion around browser support was happening with a lack of understanding on one side (bosses, clients) meeting a lack of confidence on the other (developers). Yahoo’s browser support matrix gave us ammunition. If it was okay for Yahoo to say that it was okay for certain browsers to not receive certain features, then that argument was easier to make.

A lot of the discussion now is about older Internet Explorer—IE11 comes up a lot. If IE10 and 11 are your oldest supported versions, you can use the ms- prefixed grid layout.

Some people are using devices that aren’t updating to new browsers. UC browser for Android is used a lot. It’s very popular in India (35% usage). Many browsers without grid support are mobile browsers, popular in areas where data is expensive.

People want a magical grid polyfill that will make grid work in non-supporting browsers. Please stop asking for that! Why, oh, why would you send more JavaScript to less-capable devices!

You can use feature queries to ask if a browser supports a feature before using it. The great thing about doing this is that you are future-proofing: as browsers get support for features, your code works automatically.

You can create complex layouts for browsers that support them with a few lines of CSS. Being able to do new cool stuff is great. Saving developer time is great. But making the web available to everyone …that’s exciting!

To wrap up, Rachel recounts some of the other responses to her survey. People said they were “Excited!”

See also:

• Torre’s notes from this talk.

I’m at An Event Apart Seattle (Special Edition) taking notes during the talks. Here are my notes from Yesenia’s presentation…

In the last few years, we’ve seen a lot of change in web design as we have to adapt to so many viewports and platforms. We’ve gravitated towards design systems to manage this. Many people have written about the benefits of design systems, like AirBnB.

But how do you define a design system? You could say it’s a collection of reususable components.

Donella Meadows wrote Thinking in Systems. She said:

A system is an interconnected group of elements coherently organized in a way that achieves something.

A good design system inspires people to work with it. A bad system gets bloated and unusable. Yesenia has seen systems fail when there’s too much focus on the elements, and not enough focus on how they come together. Yesenia has learned that we should start our design systems, not with components, or modules, or legos, but with user scenarios.

Yesenia works at Vox Media. They have eight editorial networks. Two and a half years ago, they started a project to move all of their products to one codebase and one design system. Maintaining and iterating on their websites was getting too cumbersome. They wanted to shift away from maintaining discrete brands to creating a cohesive system. They also wanted to help their editorial teams tell stories faster and better.

It was hard. Each brand has its own visual identity, editorial missions, and content needs. So even though they wanted eight brands to use one design system, there needed to be enough flexibility to allow for unique needs.

There were some early assumptions that didn’t work. There was a hunch that they could take smaller modular components to address inconsistencies in design: layout, colour, and typography. They thought a theming system would work well. They started with layout modules, like three different homepage hero elements, or four different story blocks. They thought they could layer colour and typography over these modules. It didn’t work. They weren’t reflecting critical differences in content, tone, and audience. For example, Curbed and Recode are very different, but the initial design system didn’t reflect those difference.

That brings us back to Donella Meadows:

A system is an interconnected group of elements coherently organized in a way that achieves something.

They weren’t thinking about that last part.

They learned that they couldn’t start with just the individual components or patterns. That’s because they don’t exist in a vacuum. As Alla says:

Start with language, not systems.

They started again, this time thinking about people.

• What’s the audience goal?
• Is there a shared audience goal across all brands or are there differences?
• What’s the editorial workflow?
• What range of content should this support?

This led to a much better process for creating a design system.

Start with a fast, unified platform. It should load quickly and work across all devices. All patterns should solve a specific problem. But that doesn’t mean creating a one-size-fits-all solution. A design system doesn’t have to stifle creativity …as long as the variants solve a real problem. That means no hypothetical situations.

Identify scenarios. Brad uses a UI inventory for this. Alla talks about a “purpose-directed inventory”. Map core modules to user journeys to see how patterns fit together in the bigger picture. You start to see families of patterns joined together by a shared purpose. Scenarios can help at every level.

The Salesforce design system starts by saying “Know your use-case.” They have examples of different patterns and where to use them. Thinking in user-flows like this matches the way that designers are already thinking.

Shopify’s Polaris system also puts users and user-flows at the centre: the purpose of each pattern is spelled out.

The 18F Design System doesn’t just provide a type system; it provides an explanation of when and where to use which type system.

At Vox, “features” are in-depth pieces. Before having a unified system, each feature looked very custom and were hard to update. They need to unify 18 different systems into one. They started by identifying core workflows. Audience goals were consistent (consume content, find new content), but editorial goals were quite different.

They ended up with quite a few variations of patterns (like page headers, for example), but only if there was a proven content need—no hypothetical situations.

Brand expression for features is all about the details. They started with 18 very different feature templates and ended up with one robust template that works across device types but still allowed for expression.

The “reviews” pieces had a scorecard pattern. Initially there was one unified pattern that they thought would be flexible enough to cover different scenarios. But these scorecards were for very different things: games; restaurants, etc. So people’s needs were very different. In the end, instead of having one scorecard pattern, they created three. Each one highlighted different content according to the user needs.

Homepages were the most challenging to unify. Each one was very distinct. Identifying core workflows took a lot of work.

What’s the value of the homepage? Who is the audience? What are they looking for?

They talked to their users and distilled their findings down into three user goals for homepages:

• What’s new?
• What’s important?
• What’s helpful?

Those needs then translated into patterns. The story feed is there to answer the question “What’s new?”

When it came to variations on the home page, they needed to make sure their design system could stretch enough to allow for distinctly different needs. There’s a newspaper layout, an evergreen layout, a morning recap layout.

Again, Alla’s advice to focus on language was really helpful.

In the process of naming an element, you work out the function as a group and reach agreement.

The last piece was to have a scalable visual design system. Brands need to feel distinct and express an identity. They did this by having foundational elements (type scale, colour system, and white space) with theming applied to them. Thinking of type and colour as systems was key: they need to cascade.

But how do you tell good variation from bad variation? Variation is good if there’s a specific problem that you need a new pattern to solve—there’s a user scenario driving the variation. A bad variation is visual variation on components that do the same thing. Again, the initial design system provided room for “visual fluff and flair” but they were hypothetical. Those variations were removed.

The combination of a scenario-driven system combined with theming allowed for the right balance of consistency and customisation. Previously, the editorial team were hacking together the layouts they wanted, or developers were creating one-off templates. Both of those approaches were very time-consuming. Now, the reporters can focus on telling better stories faster. That was always the goal.

There’s still a lot of work to do. There’s always a pendulum swing between consistency and variation. Sometimes the design system goes too far in one direction or the other and needs to be recalibrated. They want to be able to add more detailed control over typography and spacing.

To wrap up:

1. Successful design patterns don’t exist in a vacuum.
2. Successful design systems solve specific problems.
3. Successful design systems start with content and with people.

See also:

• Torre’s notes from this talk.
• Luke’s notes from this talk.

It’s time for the second talk at An Event Apart Seattle (Special Edition). Sarah is talking about Digital Marketing Strategies for the Busy “Web Master”. These are the notes I made during the talk…

Recently Sarah was asked for her job title recently and she found it really stressful. She wasn’t comfortable with “Art Director”. And, even though it would probably be accurate, “Social Media Expert” feels icky. A more fitting title would be “Social Media Designer” but that’s not a thing. Ironically the term “Web Master” probably fits us better than it did back in the ’90s.

We have a bit of a defeatist attitude towards social media at the moment. It feels like that space has been claimed and so there’s no point in even starting. But we’re still in the first 10,000 days in the web. There is no social media, Gary Vee says. It’s a slang term for a collection of apps and websites that now dominate attention in our society.

Sarah likes the term “consensual hallucination” (that I borrowed from William Gibson to describe how we did web design for years). It applies to social media.

Once upon a time we had to sell the benefits of just being online to our clients. Our businesses now need to get into the mindset of “How can I help you?” and “What can I do for you?” We’re moving away from being sales-y and getting down to being more honest. We’re no longer saying “Look at what I’ve got.”

The average time spent on social media per day is 1 hour and 48 minutes. The average time spent on the kind of sites we make is 15 seconds.

Quarterly design reviews are a good idea—strategically designing your social media campaigns, reviewing successes and failures.

The first thing to mention is vanity metrics. You might need to sit down and have “the talk” with your boss or client about this. It’s no different to having hit counters on our sites back in the ’90s. While we’re chasing these vanity metrics, we’re not asking what people really want.

Google brought a roadshow to Sarah’s hometown of Leigh-on-Sea a while back. There was a really irritating know-it-all chap in the audience who put his hand up when other people were asking about how to get followers on social media. “You need to post three times a day to all social media channels”, he said. “And you need to use the follow-unfollow method with a bot.” Sarah’s eyes were rolling at this point. Don’t beg for likes and follows—you’re skewing your metrics.

“What about this Snapchat thing?” people asked. Irritating guy said, “Don’t worry about—young people use it to send rude pictures to each other.” Sarah was face-palming at this point.

But this event was a good wake-up call for Sarah. We need to check our personal bias. She had to check her own personal bias against LinkedIn.

What we can do is look for emerging social networks. Find social networks that aren’t yet clogged. People still fixate on displayed numbers instead of the actual connection with people.

We all have a tendency to think of the more successful social networks as something that is coming. Like Snapchat. But if you’re in this space, there’s no time to waste. Sarah has been interviewing for social media people and it’s fascinating to see how misunderstood Snapchat is. One big misconception is that it’s only for youngsters. The numbers might be lower than Facebook, but there’s a lot of video on there. Snapchat’s weakness is “the olds”—the non-intuitive interface makes it cool with young people who have time to invest in learning it; the learning curve keeps the parents out. Because the moment that mums and grandmums appear on a social network, the younger folks get out. And actually, when it comes to putting ads on Snapchat, the interface is very good.

What can we do in 2018?

• By 2019, video will account for 80% of all consumer internet traffic. If you’re not planning for this, you’re missing out.
• Move to HTTPS.
• Make your website mobile ready.

Let’s ban the pop-up. Overlays. Permission dialogs. They’re all terrible. Google has started to penalise websites “where content is not easily accessible.”

Pop-ups are a lazy fix for a complex engagement problem (similar to carousels). It’s a terrible user experience. Do we thing this is adding value? Is this the best way to get someone’s email address? They’re like the chuggers of the web.

Here’s an interesting issue: there are discount codes available on the web. We inform people of this through pop-ups. Then it when it comes to check-out, they know that a discount is possible and so they Google for discount codes. You might as well have a page on your own website to list your own discount codes instead of people going elsewhere for them.

There’s a long tail of conversions, particularly with more expensive products and services. Virgin Holidays has a great example. For an expensive holiday, they ask for just a small deposit up front.

Let’s talk about some specific social networks.

Facebook

Facebook Pixel should be on your website, says Sarah. It collects data about your customers. (Needless to say, I disagree with this suggestion. Stand up for your customers’ dignity.)

Facebook is a very cheap way to publish video. Organic Facebook engagement is highest on posts with videos. (I think I threw up in my mouth a little just typing the words “organic”, “Facebook”, and “engagement” all in a row.) Facebook Live videos have six times the engagement of regular videos.

Sarah just said the word synergy. Twice. Unironically.

Facebook changed its algorithm last year. You’re going to see less posts from business and more posts from people.

Facebook advertising does work, but if it doesn’t work for you, the problem is probably down to your creative. (We’re using the word “creative” as a noun rather than an adjective, apparently.)

Google

With Ad Words, measure success by conversions rather than impressions. You might get thousands of eyeballs looking at a form, but only a handful filling it out. You need to know that second number to understand how much you’re really paying per customer.

trends.google.com is useful for finding keywords that aren’t yet saturated.

Google My Business is under-used, especially if you have a bricks’n’mortar store. It can make a massive difference to small businesses. It’s worth keeping it up to date and keeping it updated.

Instagram

700 million active users (double Twitter, and three times WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger). A lot of people are complaining about the changed algorithm. Social networks change their algorithms to deal with the “problems of success.” Instagram needs to help people with the discoverability of posts, says Sarah (again, I strongly disagree—it disempowers the user; I find Instagram’s we-know-best algorithm to be insultingly patronising).

Hashtags are the plumbing of the social media ecosystem. They’re not there for users to read. They’re for discoverability. Eleven hashtags are optimal.

Instagram Stories are a funny one. People are trying to use them to get around the algorithm, posting screenshots of photos to a story.

Archiving is a handy feature of Instagram. For time-sensitive content (like being closed during a snowstorm), it’s very useful to be able to archive those posts after the fact.

Planoly is a great website for managing your Instagram campaign. You can visually plan your feed. Only recently did Instagram start allowing scheduled posts (as long as they’re square, for some reason).

Influencer marketing is a thing. People trust peer recommendations more than advertising. You can buy micro-influencers quite cheaply.

(Side note: I think I’ve seen this episode of Black Mirror.)

How much do influencers cost? Not as much as you think. The average sponsored post rate is $180.

Case study

We need to have a “Design once. Use Everywhere.” mindset. Others we’ll go crazy. Away is doing this well. They sell a suitcase with built-in USB chargers.

The brands dominating social media are those with the most agile teams with exceptional storytelling skills. Away are very brave with their marketing. They’ve identified what their market has in common—travel—and they’re aiming at the level above that. They’re playing the long game, bringing the value back to the user. It’s all about “How can I help you?” rather than “Look at what I’ve gone.” Away’s creative is compelling, quirky, and fun. They work with influencers who are known to create beautiful imagery. Those influencers were given free suitcases. The cost of giving away those bags was much less than a traditional marketing campaign.

Their product is not front and centre in their campaigns. Travel is front and centre. They also collaborate with other brands. Their Google Ads are very striking. That also translates to physical advertising, like ads on airport security trays.

On Facebook, and on all of the social networks, everything is very polished and art-directed. They’re building a story. The content is about travel, but the through-line is about their suitcases.

When things go bad…

To finish, a semi-amusing story. Cath Kidston did a collaboration with Disney’s Peter Pan. Sarah had a hunch that it might go wrong. On paper, the social campaigns seemed fine. A slow build-up to the Peter Pan product launch. Lots of lovely teasers. They were seeding Instagram with beautiful imagery the day before launch. There was a real excitement building. Then the coveted email campaign with the coveted password.

On the site, people put in their password and then they had to wait. It was a deliberately gated experience. Twenty minutes of waiting. Then you finally get to the store …and there’s no “add to cart” button. Yup, they had left out the most important bit of the interface.

Sarah looked at what people were saying on Twitter. Lots of people assumed the problem was with their computer (after all, the web team wouldn’t be so silly as to leave off the “add to cart” button, right?). People blamed themselves. Cath Kidston scrambled to fix the problem …and threw people back into the 20 minute queue. Finally, the button appeared. So Sarah looked at a few bits ad pieces, and when she hit “add to cart” …she was thrown back to the 20 minute queue.

Sarah reached out to try to talk to someone on the web team. No one wanted to talk about it. If you ever find someone who was on that team, put them in touch.

Anyway, to wrap up…

Ensure the networks you are pursuing make sense for your brand.

Find your story for social media longevity.

See also:

• Torre’s notes on this talk

I’m at An Event Apart Seattle (Special Edition). Jeffrey is kicking off the show with a presentation called Beyond Engagement: the Content Performance Quotient. I’m going to jot down some notes during this talk…

First, a story. Jeffrey went to college in Bloomington, Indiana. David Frost—the British journalist—came to talk to them. Frost had a busy schedule, and when he showed up, he seemed a little tipsy. He came up to the podium and said, “Good evening, Wilmington.”

Jeffrey remembers this and knows that Seattle and Portland have a bit of a rivalry, and so Jeffrey thought, the first time he spoke in Portland, it would be funny to say “Good morning, Seattle!” …and that was the last time he spoke in Portland.

Anyway …”Good morning, Portland!”

Jeffrey wants to talk about content. He spends a lot of time in meetings with stakeholders. Those stakeholders always want things to be better, and they always talk about “engagement.” It’s the number one stakeholder request. It’s a metric that makes stakeholders feel comfortable. It’s measurable—the more seconds people give us, the better.

But is that really the right metric?

There are some kinds of sites where engagement is definitely the right metric. Instagram, for example. That’s how they make money. You want to distract yourself. Also, if you have a big content site—beautifully art-directed and photographed—then engagement is what you want. You want people to spend a lot of time there. Or if you have a kids site, or a games site, or a reading site for kids, you want them to be engaged and spend time. A List Apart, too. It’s like the opposite of Stack Overflow, where you Google something and grab the piece of code you need and then get out. But for A List Apart or Smashing Magazine, you want people to read and think and spend their time. Engagement is what you want.

But for most sites—insurance, universities—engagement is not what you want. These sites are more like a customer service desk. You want to help the customer as quickly as possible. If a customer spends 30 minutes on our site, was she engaged …or frustrated? Was it the beautiful typography and copy …or because she couldn’t find what they wanted? If someone spends a long time on an ecommerce site, is it because the products are so good …or because search isn’t working well?

What we need is a metric called speed of usefulness. Jeffrey calls this Content Performance Quotient (CPQ) …because business people love three-letter initialisms. It’s a loose measurement: How quickly can you solve the customer’s problem? It’s the shortest distance between the problem and the solution. Put another way, it’s a measurement of your value to the customer. It’s a new way to evaluate success.

From the customer’s point of view, CPQ is the time it takes the customer to get the information she came for. From the organisation’s point of view, it’s the time it takes for a specific customer to find, receive, and absorb your most important content.

We’re all guilty of neglecting the basics on our sites—just what it is it that we do? We need to remember that we’re all making stuff to make people’s live’s easier. Otherwise we end up with what Jeffrey calls “pretty garbage.” It’s aesthetically coherent and visually well-designed …but if the content is wrong and doesn’t help anyone, it’s garbage. Garbage in a delightfully responsive grid is still garbage.

Let’s think of an example of where people really learned to cut back and really pare down their message. Advertising. In the 1950s, when the Leo Burnett agency started the Marlboro campaign, TV spots were 60 seconds long. An off-camera white man in a suit with a soothing voice would tell you all about the product while the visuals showed you what he was talking about. No irony. Marlboro did a commercial where there was no copy at all until the very end. For 60 seconds they showed you cowboys doing their rugged cowboy things. Men in the 1950s wanted to feel rugged, you see. Leo Burnett aimed the Marlboro cigarettes at those men. And at the end of the 60 second montage of rugged cowboys herding steers, they said “Come to where the flavour is. Come to Marlboro Country.” For the billboard, they cut it back even more. Just “Come to Marlboro Country.” In fact, they eventually went to just “Marlboro.” Jeffrey knows that this campaign worked well, because he started smoking Marlboros as a kid.

Leaving aside the ethical implications of selling cigarettes to eight-graders, let’s think about the genius of those advertisers. Slash your architecture and shrink your content. Constantly ask yourself, “Why do we need this?”

As Jared Spool says, design is the rendering of intent. Every design is intentional. There is some intent—like engagement—driving our design. If there’s no intent behind the design, it will fail, even if what you’re doing is very good. If your design isn’t going somewhere, it’s going nowhere. You’ve got to stay ruthlessly focused on what the customer needs and “kill your darlings” as Hemingway said. Luke Wroblewski really brought this to light when he talked about Mobile First.

To paraphrase David Byrne, how did we get here?

Well, we prioritised meetings over meaning. Those meetings can be full of tension; different stakeholders arguing over what should be on the homepage. And we tried to solve this by giving everyone what they want. Having a good meeting doesn’t necessarily mean having a good meeting. We think of good meetings as conflict-free where everyone emerges happy. But maybe there should be a conflict that gets resolved. Maybe there should be winners and losers.

Behold our mighty CMS! Anyone can add content to the website. Anyone can create the information architecture …because we want to make people happy in meetings. It’s easy to give everyone what they want. It’s harder to do the right thing. Harder for us, but better for the customer and the bottom line.

As Gerry McGovern says:

Great UX professionals are like whistleblowers. They are the voice of the user.

We need to stop designing 2001 sites for a 2018 web.

One example of cutting down content was highlighted in A List Apart where web design was compared to chess: The King vs. Pawn Game of UI Design. Don’t start by going through all the rules. Teach them in context. Teach chess by starting with a checkmate move, reduced down to just three pieces on the board. From there, begin building out. Start with the most important information, and build out from there.

When you strip down the game to its core, everything you learn is a universal principle.

Another example is atomic design: focus relentlessly on the individual interaction. We do it for shopping carts. We can do it for content.

Another example on A List Apart is No More FAQs: Create Purposeful Information for a More Effective User Experience. FAQ problems include:

• duplicate and contradictory information,
• lack of discernible content order,
• repetitive grammatical structure,
• increased cognitive load, and
• more content than they need.

Users come to any type of content with a particular purpose in mind, ranging from highly specific (task completion) to general learning (increased knowledge).

The important word there is purpose. We need to eliminate distraction. How do we do that?

One way is the waterfall method. Do a massive content inventory. It’s not recommended (unless maybe you’re doing a massive redesign).

Agile and scrum is another way. Constantly iterate on content. Little by little over time, we make the product better. It’s the best bet if you work in-house.

If you work in an agency, a redesign is an opportunity to start fresh. Take everything off the table and start from scratch. Jeffrey’s friend Fred Gates got an assignment to redesign an online gaming platform for kids to teach them reading and management skills. The organisation didn’t have much money so they said, let’s just do the homepage. Fred challenged himself to put the whole thing on the homepage. The homepage tells the whole story. Jeffrey is using this same method on a site for an insurance company, even though the client has a bigger budget and can afford more than just the homepage. The point is, what Fred did was effective.

So this is what Jeffrey is going to be testing and working on: speed of usefulness.

And for those of you who do need to use engagement as the right metric, Jeffrey covered the two kinds of metrics in an article called We need design that is faster and design that is slower.

For example, “scannability” is good for transactions (CPQ), but bad for thoughtful content (engagement). Our news designs need to slow down the user. Bigger type, typographic hierarchy, and more whitespace. Art direction. Shout out to Derek Powazek who designed Fray.com—each piece was designed based on the content. These days, look at what David Sleight and his crew are doing over at Pro Publica.

Who’s doing it right?

The Washington Post, The New York Times, Pro Publica, Slate, Smashing Magazine, and Vox are all doing this well in different ways. They’re bringing content to the fore.

Readability, Medium, and A List Apart are all using big type to encourage thoughtful reading and engagement.

But for other sites …apply the Content Performance Quotient.

See also:

• Luke's notes from this talk
• Torre's notes from this talk

This year’s Render conference just wrapped up in Oxford. It was a well-run, well-curated event, right up my alley: two days of a single track of design and development talks (see also: An Event Apart and Smashing Conference for other events in this mold that get it right).

One of my favourite talks was from Frances Ng. She gave a thoroughly entertaining account of her journey from aerospace engineer to front-end engineer, filled with ideas about how to get started, and keep from getting overwhelmed in the world of the web.

She recommended taking the time to occasionally dive deep into a foundational topic, pointing to another talk as a perfect example; Ana Balica gave a great presentation all about HTTP. The second half of the talk was about HTTP 2 and was filled with practical advice, but the first part was a thoroughly geeky history of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which I really loved.

While I’m mentoring Amber, we’ve been trying to find a good balance between those deep dives into the foundational topics and the hands-on day-to-day skills needed for web development. So far, I think we’ve found a good balance.

When Amber is ‘round at the Clearleft office, we sit down together and work on the practical aspects of HTML, CSS, and (soon) JavaScript. Last week, for example, we had a really great day diving into CSS selectors and specificity—I watched Amber’s knowledge skyrocket over the course of the day.

But between those visits—which happen every one or two weeks—I’ve been giving Amber homework of sorts. That’s where the foundational building blocks come in. Here are the questions I’ve asked so far:

• What is the difference between the internet and the web?
• What is the difference between GET and POST?
• What are cookies?

The first question is a way of understanding the primacy of URLs on the web. Amber wrote about her research. The second question was getting at an understanding of HTTP. Amber wrote about that too. The third and current question is about state on the web. I’m looking forward to reading a write-up of that soon.

We’re still figuring out this whole mentorship thing but I think this balance of research and exercises is working out well.

The time had come for Jeremy to leave Brighton. He was being called away to the far shores of the Pacific Northwest. What would have once been a sea voyage and overland trek lasting for weeks and months took him just nine hours in the belly of a flying machine. Having made landfall in Seattle he then had to stand in front of a room full of his peers at An Event Apart and speak to them about progressive enhancement. Jeremy tries to remain humble but as he stepped off that stage, two words went through his mind: “Nailed. It!”

In the latest episode of the Rissington podcast a listener asks What Podcasts do you listen to regularly? The panel answer with some top-notch listening recommendations. I’d just like to chime in with my own number one choice: Radiolab. Yes, technically it’s a radio programme rather than a made-for-Web podcast but that’s also true of my second choice, Mark Kermode’s film reviews.

The latest episode of Radiolab is somewhat special: the whole thing was recorded live in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The subject matter is also pretty special. The episode is devoted to War of the Worlds; not the book, not the many film versions, but the classic Orson Welles radio dramatisation. There’s a lot of resonance with more recent phenomena like ARGs. While we can’t quite place ourselves in the mindset of 1938, it’s still pretty thrilling to listen to that original broadcast. A recording of the radio broadcast is available on the Internet Archive.

Ah, Orson Welles! Most people will remember his best film work as being Citizen Kane but we really know that Touch of Evil (but not the studio cut) is his real meisterwerk. And while everyone remembers his War of the Worlds broadcast, who knows of the genius that is frozen peas:

We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire, where Mrs. Buckley lives. Every July, peas grow there.

As for his renowned acting talents, surely his finest work was revealed towards the end of his life when he poured his soul into this Paul Masson wine commercial.

I’m listening to Jessica play some music on iTunes and I can’t help but think what a shame it is that Last.fm has no knowledge of this. The MyWare of Last.fm only works for my devices; my iTunes, my Mobile Scrobbler. It would be nice if I could somehow let Last.fm know that I’m currently listening to the music of another Last.fm user. It would be even nicer if I didn’t need a computer to do it. Suppose I could just use my mobile phone to send a message to Twitter. Something like:

@lastfm listening to @wordridden

or:

@lastfm scrobbling @wordridden

There would need to be some corresponding method of switching of the link-up. I haven’t really thought it through that far. I’m just jotting down this idea in case anyone out there wants to try using the respective APIs to give this a whirl.

There are two problems with April fool’s day on the Web.

Firstly, there’s the curiously timeless nature of online publishing. Google has a habit of preserving everything we write in amber so that long after a joke has been published in the context of April 1st, it resurfaces in search results where it may the taken at face value.

Secondly, it becomes very difficult to separate “real” stories from the japes. Remember a few years back when Google launched their GMail service? Remember what day they launched it on? I recall quite a few people who refused to believe the veracity of the announcement.

With that in mind, here are some tidbits that are most definitely pranks:

• GMail adds time-travel support using an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality.
• John Resig releases Class Query for developers who are sick and tired of brevity and simplicity. This one is only funny if you a total code nerd but if you are a total code nerd, it’s very funny indeed.
• The Web Standards Project follow up their bookmark campaign with hyper-localised social tagging.
• Moo announce the MightyCard.
• The latest World of Warcraft character is the bard with damage effects like “epic solo” and “shoegazer”.
• The BBC show flying penguins.
• And finally, every single featured video on YouTube is a winner today.

These bits of news, on the other hand, are for real:

• Joe launches Captioning Sucks in an attempt to bring sanity and standards to the worlds of film and television. Any garishness you may experience is intentional.
• The good people over at Flickr have resurrected Game Neverending—the game that many years ago served as the genesis for Flickr itself (that’s why you’ll still the .gne extension to this day). The message announcing the resurrection is, of course, very much a joke.

There was one other announcement from Flickr but they managed to get it out right before the dreaded day of foolishness. The site now has a flawless import feature that has completely scrapped the password anti-pattern. Instead they’re using authentication APIs from GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail (that last one is actually a bit of a cheat as Yahoo do not offer any export API for external services).

Needless to say, I’m over the moon about this (although Lachlan is less pleased). First Dopplr, now Flickr. And I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t even put Flickr in the running in the race to do the right thing. Consider me suitably chastised.

At the risk of becoming API-watch Central, I feel I must point out some nifty new features that have been added to Upcoming.org.

Andy and the gang have been diligently geotagging events using Yahoo’s geocoder API. Best of all, these latitude and longitude co-ordinates are now also being exposed through the API. Methinks Adactio Austin won’t be the last mashing up of event and map data I’ll be doing.

On the Upcoming site itself, you can now limit the number of attendees for an event, edit any venues you’ve added and edit your comments. This comes just a few days after Brian Suda mentioned in a chat that he would like to have the option to edit this comment later (right now he’s looking for somewhere to stay during XTech).

Feature wished for; feature added. This is exactly the kind of iterative, evolutionary growth that goes a long way towards what Kathy Sierra calls creating passionate users. By all accounts, her panel at South by Southwest was nothing short of outstanding. Everyone I spoke to who attended was raving about it for days. Muggins here missed it but I have a good excuse. I was busy signing freshly-purchased books, so I can’t complain.

From the department of redundancy department:

"Republicans yesterday joined them yesterday…"

I’m doing my first major Flash project right now. It’s going to be a website for my band, Salter Cane.

I want to avoid all the worst excesses and pitfalls usually associated with Flash and try to to use to convey atmosphere and feeling.

When I visit Flash sites as powerful as this one, I don’t know whether to feel inspired or whether I should just give up because I’ll never produce something this amazing and affecting.