“Making software isn’t easy. You have to make a lot of decisions and have good strong reasoning for doing so. A lot of the decisions I make are with my gut, and revolve around my personal taste. But there’s another way to design things, and that’s “safely.”
It’s not easy either, but designing safely means designing for everyone (80%+ of the population). Often, designing safely means making decisions that don’t make you happy personally. You include a feature so that someone else will like it.”
I think Louie should take it one step further. Write Opinionated Software. Don’t write mushy middle-of-the-road swiss army knife software. Write something with a voice.
I wrote this for some internal documentation around or data visualization (i.e. Dashboards) standards. I kind of like it.
Here’s something you may use every week, a gas pump. Most people probably don’t think much about how it was put together.
This is a perfect example of something made without much cohesive design. Every gas station is different, every pump manufacturer, every point-of-sale vendors, etc. Each with its own design decisions and logic. We learn to deal with these inconsistencies every time we stop for gas. In the worse case we become frustrated or make mistakes due to the lack of consistency. In the best cases all parts are easy to understand and work consistently.
In the physical world there is a long and complex history in the development of interfaces – multiple owners, physical and technical limitations, regulatory influences, etc.
However, even with those differences, we all know how to navigate this process. We’ve developed knowledge of what parts of the display we can interact with and how certain parts need to be selected first before seeing changes elsewhere.
The same is true in the digital world. People have come to rely on a lot of subtle clues to make their way through an interface: buttons have slight gradients and rounded corners, links have hover states, form fields have a soft inner shadow, and navigation bars “float” over the rest of the content.
These consistent elements are the focus of our user interface (UI) standards – the things we can make consistent should be consistent regardless of creator or audience. We have the unique opportunity, unlike the beleaguered gas station pump designers, to work together to create a shared language and experience when creating content for our co-workers.
“Using Paper, I have a sense of anxiety: what if this is what designers make when not yoked to “product thinking”? What if Matas et alia sans Jobs or Forstall are capable of impossibly perfect physics in UIs, of great elements of design, but not of holistic product thinking, of real product integrity? What if design uses its seat at the table to draw pretty things, but otherwise not pay much attention to the outcomes, the user behaviors, the things enabled?”
…
“In order to avoid losing its place atop organizations, design must deliver results. Designers must also accept that if they don’t, they’re not actually designing well; in technology, at least, the subjective artistry of design is mirrored by the objective finality ofuse data. A “great” design which produces bad outcomes —low engagement, little utility, few downloads, indifference on the part of the target market— should be regarded as a failure.”
Mills Baker has some great thoughts about the role of design and its impact on the success of a product. It reminds me of an old adage. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. If design is to assist in the utility and usefulness of a product, then you should have some specific goals around what success looks like. Otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels.
But that has changed. I’m hard-pressed to think of any paradigm shift, in terms of personnel, quite as drastic and rapid as the new role of the developer. With software being free and readily available, the sole ball and chain left shackled to the ankles of developers was hardware — but with the development of the cloud market, developers have a newfound stray-dog freedom.
What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”
But we can fix it, I swear. We just have to start telling each other the truth. Not the doublespeak bullshit of regulators and lobbyists, but the actual truth. Once we have the truth, we have the power — the power to demand better not only from our government, but from the companies that serve us as well.
I don’t really have any answers here—hell, I’m not entirely sure what I’m griping about. But I do wonder if our collective short-term frustrations leads us to longer-term losses. And seeing the web not as a “platform” but as a “continuum”—a truly fluid, chaotic design medium serving millions of imperfect clients—might help.
Thanks to @timothy_snyder and others on Twitter for sharing these.
Sony has this nice little utility for the PS Vita that allows you to sync and backup your content. It’s called Content Manager Assistant (CMA).1 It runs as a menubar item on your Mac (or a taskbar item on Windows) and after initial setup the interaction is managed from the PS Vita itself. You can back up your entire PS Vita, sync music and photos, and the whole thing works over USB or Wi-Fi. Pretty neat.
CMA Menubar Item
As a Playstation Portable owner I was happy to hear that they have a native Mac client. Back in the PSP days we had to hike both ways uphill in the snow with third-party software to sync content to our Macs.2
However – oh, you knew this was coming – there is an issue with how the application is installed. By default, and with no way to change this setting via the application’s preferences, it will run at login for all users. Trying to remove the login item via the Users & Group preferences pane will prove frustrating.
(All? All what? Oh, All Users…
WTF Sony.
Here’s how to remove this. Note: if you update or reinstall CMA, you’ll have to do this all over again. Yay!
First navigate to the “Macintosh HD/Library /Preferences” folder and look for a file called ‘com.apple.loginitems.plist‘. This is not the same as your User directory (~/Library/Preferences). You should be able to open it with something like TextWrangler.3
If the only entry you see in the entire file is for Content Manager Assistant or CMA.app feel free to just delete the file. You’ll be prompted to enter your admin username/password to remove the file.
Update:SkatyGarcia on Reddit schooled me on a much better way to remove CMA from startup. Instead of all the mumbo-jumbo I describe above, instead click the ‘unlock’ icon in the lower left of the Users & Group preference pane. Enter your admin password and then you can remove CMA from the list. Much more logical than my directions.
Restart your Mac, check the Users & Group preference pane and curse the developers at Sony (nicely, they did make an otherwise useful app).
I hope this helps regain some control and relieve some frustration for other Mac/PS Vita folks out there in Internetland.
