Who's Stupid?

Andy Rutledge wrote a post that is frighteningly on target. He argues that the "quality of your client experiences is directly proportional to the quality of your professionalism". He goes on to state that if your clients are "stupid" you may want to take a step back and consider who may truly be responsible for these failed interactions. He starts by pointing out how you can set yourself up for failure before you even start on a project:

If you don’t research and vet your potential client before asking them to sign your contract, stop being stupid. If you bid on projects even though the potential client doesn’t know much about you or why you’d be a good (or bad) choice for them (they “just need a web designer”), stop being stupid.

He continues by analyzing how web designers can continue to lay the groundwork for "stupid" clients by failing to have a proper workflow in place:

If you aren’t the one defining the project process, stop being stupid. If you don’t define, police, and unfailingly adhere to specific milestone requirements and deadlines for both yourself and your clients, stop being stupid. If you’re producing design artefacts before completing a comprehensive discovery process, stop being stupid.

Too often, we rush blindly forward into new projects and new relationships with clients. This process is not at all conducive to high quality work. Quality work requires an investment of time and a devotion of resources. To craft a site of true quality, you need to take a step back and slow the process down — making sure you understand the problem you are trying to solve and ensuring that the solution you are proposing is the right solution for that particular problem.

While the stupid tag may feel a bit confrontational it does not detract from the argument that Rutledge is making: not all failed relationships are the fault of the client. By failing to invest the proper amount of time and attention into planning, research, and careful consideration of requirements, firms and freelancers often set themselves up for failed client relationships.

Version 3.0

For the second time this year, I'm launching a redesign of this site. Shortly after putting the last redesign live, I started wishing I'd have allowed for a little more flexibility in the types of content I produced. While I still enjoy writing full, detailed posts at times, there are a lot of times I just want to share a quick thought, or pass along a quote from an article I found particularly good.

I gave Tumblr a try for a little bit, and I loved the freedom it gave me to post content I found important, regardless of how much detail I felt it warranted at the moment. Really, the only thing I didn't like was the fact that I was now blogging in two different places - this site and my Tumblr blog. Since Tumblr had no easy way to import all my old posts from Wordpress, I decided to make use of the custom post type capabilities in Wordpress to build my own version of a tumblelog.

Since the frequency of posts will undoubtedly be picking up with the additions of these shorter post types, let me know if any of you would prefer to have a feed for just the "feature-length" posts. Right now, the main feed pulls everything.

The underlying structure didn't change a ton - it's still HTML5 based. As of the time of this post, there's only one image being used in the site (other than anything called by the Google Analytics script). The rest of the graphical elements are a combination of CSS gradients and data URIs to help reduce the number of HTTP requests.

So have a look around. The plan is for this version of the site to stick around awhile.

Mobile User Behavior Groups

According to an article on Information Week, Google classifies mobile users into three behavior groups:

The “repetitive now” user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.

The “bored now” are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don’t offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.

The “urgent now” is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.

I think it’s a pretty accurate categorization, and a good thing to keep in mind when you’re building your mobile site or app. Each “type” of user is interacting with your content with a different goal in mind, and the experience should be tailored accordingly.

To comment, or not to comment...

Derek Powazek shares his thoughts on turning off comments:

I turned off comments in the last redesign of powazek.com because I needed a place online that was just for me. With comments on, when I sat down to write, I’d preemptively hear the comments I’d inevitably get. It made writing a chore, and eventually I stopped writing altogether. Turning comments off was like taking a weight off my shoulders. It freed me to write again.

I too have been trying to decide whether to continue using comments on my main blog. On the one hand, I can sympathize with Derek. I often “hear” the comments I’ll get, or won’t get, and ultimately allow that to either adjust the content in a post, or don’t publish the post at all.

On the other hand, I truly do enjoy the good discussion that can sometimes takeplace, and I don’t want to lose that. Perhaps a reply by Twitter option (as Jon Hicks is considering) is a decent option to generate that discussion without the feeling of obligation?

On delinkification...

Nick Carr makes a very interesting and compelling argument for “delinkification”:

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

I like the approach taken by Readability. They generate a list of footnotes from the links, and then remove any special formatting for links within the text. I still have my links, in their original context, but I’m no longer distracted by them since they appear to be regular text at a glance.

The Great Mobile Debate

There's been an ongoing debate in the world of mobile development as to how mobile apps should be distributed, via an open system or a closed system, and consequently, how one should approach mobile development. We could probably also call this debate "Apple versus everyone else".

The issue has been brought up many times, usually right after Apple announces some change in the way they accept applications into their store. With each change, invariably some apps, and some companies who have built a living off of those apps, get the short end of the stick and are no longer deemed acceptable for Apples' standards (whatever they may be at that particular minute).