I recently went to the Mix conference in Las Vegas, where I got to learn and see a lot of very cool things, but undeniably, one of the stars was design researcher Bill Buxton. I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what he said in his portion of the keynote, and I think it boils down to one simple sentence.
We all have heard the speech about how dangerous it is to post personal information on Facebook. We know people who get angry at Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for arguing Facebook users don’t want privacy online. However, I think a fundamental part of the disagreement about privacy in social media is not on its value, or its virtues, but its definition.
For a company with a rich history of passing off iteration as innovation, it’s pretty weird to see almost all of IE7’s design decisions being implemented — and improved upon — in almost every other browser.
When 37 Signals redesigned their signup forms, the goal was to find a way to make the page shorter, but equally effective. I think they did a great job of it. What they ended up doing reminded me a lot of what I wrote about in my post about a lossy text compressor.
I recently stumbled upon the Edustyle awards page, because I wanted to see what ideas other designers bring to academic websites. Brown University’s gateway definitely has some interesting ideas – interesting enough to win a most innovative award from Edustyle.
I can’t believe it took four years to realize the continents in the Firefox icon are blue. They look like they’re submerged underwater. And there aren’t any polar ice caps in the icon, so it’s obvious there’s some sort of political motivation here. No, wait – I’m kidding. Of course I know Jon Hicks is colorblind.
I’ve been writing a fair amount lately about how the web is not as much a mass medium for the masses as it has been in the past. There’s still one more musing left for me to share on that topic: we’ve chosen to value machines reading our sites more than humans being able to edit them.
I think the biggest reason why the web is not a mass medium for the masses is because, although CSS has become the backbone of web design, WYSIWYG editors fail to visualize the effects of stylesheets on a web page. When what you see is what you get, you can’t edit something that’s virtually invisible.
By the way, I’m getting married next month. That means hiring people to do things I don’t know how to do. Like make a wedding cake, for example. But I don’t know anything about cake – and of course, I’m not supposed to. Just like my clients aren’t supposed to be web design geeks.
Ten years ago, what I really loved about the world wide web was that it seemed to be a mass medium that didn’t belong to corporations, or any other sort of media gatekeeper. Today, I’m dreading the realization that such gatekeepers do exist on the web, and my skillset has made me one of them.