Tags: tip

A while back I wrote a blog post called Web Audio API weirdness on iOS. I described a bug in Mobile Safari along with a hacky fix. I finished by saying:

If you ever find yourself getting weird but inconsistent behaviour on iOS using the Web Audio API, this nasty little hack could help.

Recently Jonathan Aldrich posted a thread about the same bug. He included a link to my blog post. He also said:

Thanks so much for your post, this was a truly pernicious problem!

That warms the cockles of my heart. It’s very gratifying to know that documenting the bug (and the fix) helped someone out. Or, as I put it:

Yay for bugblogging!

Forgive the Germanic compound word, but in this case I think it fits.

Bugblogging doesn’t need to involve a solution. Just documenting a bug is a good thing to do. Recently I documented a bug with progressive web apps on iOS. Before that I documented a bug in Facebook Container for Firefox. When I documented some weird behaviour with the Web Share API in Safari on iOS, I wasn’t even sure it was a bug but Tess was pretty sure it was and filed a proper bug report.

I’ve benefited from other people bugblogging. Phil Nash wrote Service workers: beware Safari’s range request. That was exactly what I needed to solve a problem I’d been having. And then that post about Phil solving my problem helped Peter Rukavina solve a similar issue so he wrote Phil Nash and Jeremy Keith Save the Safari Video Playback Day.

Again, this warmed the cockles of my heart. Bugblogging is worth doing just for the reward of that feeling.

There’s a similar kind of blog post where, instead of writing about a bug, you write about a particular technique. In one way, this is the opposite of bugblogging because you’re writing about things working exactly as they should. But these posts have a similar feeling to bugblogging because they also result in a warm glow when someone finds them useful.

Here are some recent examples of these kinds of posts—tipblogging?—that I’ve found useful:

• Eric wrote about flexibly centering an element with side-sligned content using CSS.
• Rich documented how to subset a variable font on a Mac.
• Stephanie wrote about a CSS technique for animating in a newly added element.

All three are very handy tips. Thanks, Eric! Thanks, Rich! Thanks, Stephanie!

I think a lot about Danielle’s talk at Patterns Day last year.

Around about the six minute mark she starts talking about gaps and overlaps.

Gaps are where hidden complexity live. If we don’t have a category to cover it, in effect it becomes invisible. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Unidentified gaps cause inconsistency and confusion.

Overlaps occur when two separate categories encompass some of the same areas of responsibility. They cause conflict, duplication of effort, and unnecessary friction.

This is the bit I keep thinking about. It’s such an insightful lens to view things through. On just about any project, tensions are almost due to either gaps (“I thought someone else was doing that”) or overlaps (“Oh, you’re doing that? I thought we were doing that”).

When I was talking to Gerry on his new podcast recently, we were trying to figure out why web performance is in such a woeful state. I mused that there may be a gap. Perhaps designers think it’s a technical problem and developers think it’s a design problem. I guess you could try to bridge this gap by having someone whose job is to focus entirely on performance. But I suspect the better—but harder—solution is to create a shared culture of performance, of the kind Lara wrote about in her book:

Performance is truly everyone’s responsibility. Anyone who affects the user experience of a site has a relationship to how it performs. While it’s possible for you to single-handedly build and maintain an incredibly fast experience, you’d be constantly fighting an uphill battle when other contributors touch the site and make changes, or as the Web continues to evolve.

I suspect there’s a similar ownership gap at play when it comes to the ubiquitous obtrusive overlays that are plastered on so many websites these days.

Kirill Grouchnikov recently published a gallery of screenshots showcasing the beauty of modern mobile websites:

There are two things common between the websites in these screenshots that I took yesterday.

1. They are beautifully designed, with great typography, clear branding, all optimized for readability.
2. I had to install Firefox, Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, as well as manually select and remove additional elements such as subscription overlays.

The web can be beautiful. Except it’s not right now.

How is this dissonance possible? How can designers and developers who clearly care about the user experience be responsible for unleashing such user-hostile interfaces?

PM/Legal/Marketing made me do it

I get that. But surely the solution can’t be to shrug our shoulders, pass the buck, and say “not my job.” Somebody designed each one of those obtrusive overlays. Somebody coded up each one and pushed them into production.

It’s clear that this is a problem of communication and understanding, rather than a technical problem. As always. We like to talk about how hard and complex our technical work is, but frankly, it’s a lot easier to get a computer to do what you want than to convince a human. Not least because you also need to understand what that other human wants. As Danielle says:

Recognising the gaps and overlaps is only half the battle. If we apply tools to a people problem, we will only end up moving the problem somewhere else.

Some issues can be solved with better tools or better processes. In most of our workplaces, we tend to reach for tools and processes by default, because they feel easier to implement. But as often as not, it’s not a technology problem. It’s a people problem. And the solution actually involves communication skills, or effective dialogue.

So let’s say it is someone in the marketing department who is pushing to have an obtrusive newsletter sign-up form get shoved in the user’s face. Talk to them. Figure out what their goals are—what outcome are they hoping to get to. If they don’t seem to understand the user-experience implications, talk to them about that. But it needs to be a two-way conversation. You need to understand what they need before you start telling them what you want.

I realise that makes it sound patronisingly simple, and I know that in actuality it’s a sisyphean task. It may be that genuine understanding between people is the wickedest of design problems. But even if this problem seems insurmoutable, at least you’d be tackling the right problem.

Because the web can’t survive like this.

Twitter has come in for a lot of (justifiable) criticism for changes to its API that make it somewhat developer-hostile. But it has to be said that developers don’t always behave responsibly when they’re using the API.

The classic example of this is the granting of permissions. James summed it up nicely: it’s just plain rude to ask for write-access to my Twitter account before I’ve even started to use your service. I could understand it if the service needed to post to my timeline, but most of the time these services claim that they want me to sign up via Twitter so that I can find my friends who are also using the service — that doesn’t require write access. Quite often, these requests to authenticate are accompanied by reassurances like “we’ll never tweet without your permission” …in which case, why ask for write-access in the first place?

To be fair, it used to be a lot harder to separate out read and write permissions for Twitter authentication. But now it’s actually not that bad, although it’s still not as granular as it could be.

One of the services that used to require write-access to my Twitter account was Lanyrd. I gave it permission, but only because I knew the people behind the service (a decision-making process that doesn’t scale very well). I always felt uneasy that Lanyrd had write-access to my timeline. Eventually I decided that I couldn’t in good conscience allow the lovely Lanyrd people to be an exception just because I knew where they lived. Fortunately, they concurred with my unease. They changed their log-in system so that it only requires read-access. If and when they need write-access, that’s the point at which they ask for it:

We now ask for read-only permission the first time you sign in, and only ask to upgrade to write access later on when you do something that needs it; for example following someone on Twitter from the our attendee directory.

Far too many services ask for write-access up front, without providing a justification. When asked for an explanation, I’m sure most of them would say “well, that’s how everyone else does it”, and they would, alas, be correct.

What’s worse is that users grant write-access so freely. I was somewhat shocked by the amount of tech-savvy friends who unwittingly spammed my timeline with automated tweets from a service called Twitter Counter. Their reactions ranged from sheepish to embarrassed to angry.

I urge you to go through your Twitter settings and prune any services that currently have write-access that don’t actually need it. You may be surprised by the sheer volume of apps that can post to Twitter on your behalf. Do you trust them all? Are you certain that they won’t be bought up by a different, less trustworthy company?

If a service asks me to sign up but insists on having write-access to my Twitter account, it feels like being asked out on a date while insisting I sign a pre-nuptial agreement. Not only is somewhat premature, it shows a certain lack of respect.

Not every service behaves so ungallantly. Done Not Done, 1001 Beers, and Mapalong all use Twitter for log-in, but none of them require write-access up-front.

Branch and Medium are typical examples of bad actors in this regard. The core functionality of these sites has nothing to do with posting to Twitter, but both sites want write-access so that they can potentially post to Twitter on my behalf later on. I know that I won’t ever want either service to do that. I can either trust them, or not use the service at all. Signing up without granting write-access to my Twitter account isn’t an option.

I sent some feedback to Branch and part of their response was to say the problem was with the way Twitter lumps permissions together. That used to be true, but Lanyrd’s exemplary use of Twitter for log-in makes that argument somewhat hollow.

In the case of Branch, Medium, and many other services, Twitter authentication is the only way to sign up and start using the service. Using a username and password isn’t an option. On the face of it, requiring Twitter for authentication doesn’t sound all that different to requiring an email address for authentication. But demanding write-access to Twitter is the equivalent of demanding the ability to send emails from your email address.

The way that so many services unnecessarily ask for write-access to Twitter—and the way that so many users unquestioningly grant it—reminds me of the password anti-pattern all over again. Because this rude behaviour is so prevalent, it has now become the norm. If we want this situation to change, we need to demand more respect.

The next time that a service demands unwarranted write-access to your Twitter account, refuse to grant it. Then tell the people behind that service why you’re refusing to sign up.

And please take a moment to go through the services you’ve already authorised.