Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 34

Next Generation CSS Layout With Rachel Andrew

SINCE the early days of the web, designers have been trying to lay out web pages using grid systems. Likewise, almost every CSS framework attempts to implement some kind of grid system, using floats and often leaning on preprocessors.

The CSS Grid Layout module brings us a native CSS Grid system for the first time—a grid system that does not rely on document source order, and can create complex layouts which are easily redefined with media queries.

In Rachel Andrews’s “CSS Grid Layout” session at An Event Apart Boston 2015, by following along with practical examples, you’ll learn how Grid works, and how it can be used to implement modern layouts and responsive designs.

More at An Event Apart.

Pick Up Hicks

JON HICKS. One of twelve great reasons to attend An Event Apart Boston 2015. Zeldman.com fans, save $100 at registration using discount code AEAZELD.

Jon Hicks is a Graphic Designer based in Oxfordshire, UK. He runs Hicksdesign with his wife Leigh and is most widely known for his work on the Firefox, Mailchimp, and Shopify logos, as well as recent projects such as the Skype emoticon redesign. He also quite literally wrote the book on Icons: The Icon Handbook for Five Simple Steps Publishing.

The Long Web – An Event Apart Video

IN THIS 60-minute video caught live at An Event Apart Austin, Jeremy Keith bets on HTML for the long haul:

The pace of change in our industry is relentless. New frameworks, processes, and technologies are popping up daily. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you are not alone. Let’s take a step back and look at the over-arching trajectory of web design. Instead of focusing all our attention on the real-time web, let’s see which design principles and development approaches have stood the test of the time. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but those who can learn from the past will create a future-friendly web.

Enjoy The Long Web by Jeremy Keith – An Event Apart Video.

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Big Web Show № 125: “You’re My Favorite Client” with Mike Monteiro

Monteiro and I talk design:

Designers Mike Monteiro (author, “You’re My Favorite Client”) and Jeffrey Zeldman discuss why humility is expensive, how to reassure the client at every moment that you know what you’re doing, and how to design websites that look as good on Day 400 as they do on Day 1. Plus old age, unsung heroines of the early web, and a book for designers to give to their clients.

5by5 | The Big Web Show № 125: “You’re My Favorite Client,” with Mike Monteiro.

Why DNS in OS X 10.10 is broken

MAC USERS, if you’ve experienced occasional (but not infrequent) network dropout problems since upgrading to Yosemite, this article in Ars Technica explains why, and tells how to fix it … if you dare.

I most definitely do not dare—following the suggestion could introduce system failure and security bugs when future updates come along—but the piece makes interesting reading, both from an “I’m a nerd and want to know how things work” point of view, and also in light of recent criticism by Marco Arment and others concerning Apple’s quality control.

Why DNS in OS X 10.10 is broken, and what you can do to fix it | Ars Technica. Hat tip: Jonathan Melville.

29 Again

I’M CELEBRATING my birthday with a painful stomach virus that began Thursday night and shows no signs of leaving. It feels like a jackass kicking me from the inside. I can’t eat—I tried last night, with hideous results—and have little energy: walking my daughter to school this morning wiped me out. Aside from joining a couple of remote business meetings later, I plan to spend today horizontal and quietly moaning.

The nice thing about the sickness, which began as a chest cold two weeks ago, is that it spares me from the whole social birthday thing. I’ve been too sick to plan a party or even think about one. And that suits me fine. When you turn 16 or 21, you want the world to hug you for it. But as the years rack up, the urge to announce your birth anniversary fades. Or so I have found.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m overjoyed to be alive after all these years, and boundlessly grateful to the universe and my ex for the child I love and protect. Food, shelter, and love matter. The rest is optional.

Vegan Caviar Wishes

MY FRIENDS have invited me to a New Year’s Eve party, but I’m too sick to leave the apartment. Hell, it took me all day to muster the je ne sais quoi to go downstairs to pick up my laundry.

Achieving that much—it required me to press an elevator button and exchange a few pleasantries with my doorman—wiped me out. Having achieved it, and closed the door behind me, I am more than content to spend the rest of the night (at least as much of it as I can stay awake for) sitting in my apartment in the gathering dark, listening to Kind of Blue, and creating new photographs by recropping old ones.

Anyway, New Year’s Eve is for amateurs. Back when I was a drunk, I had a name for the kind of drinking most normal people will indulge in tonight: I called it Monday. All that bile, all those tears and toilet confessions, all that coming to on somebody’s floor and searching for a fresh drink—it’s nothing I miss.

There was a time between that time and this when I was half of a beautiful couple, and we were expected to show up at social functions everywhere. How happy I was when our newborn baby gave us an excuse to spend New Year’s at home. Now I’m counting the days til my daughter returns from visiting her mom for the holidays, and calling this week’s sick time “me” time. Ain’t no party like a DayQuil party.

I wish you all joy, meaning, and safety in 2015.

Unexamined Privilege is the real source of cruelty in Facebook’s “Your Year in Review”

UNEXAMINED PRIVILEGE is the real source of cruelty in Facebook’s “Your Year in Review”—a feature conceived and designed by a group to whom nothing terrible has happened yet. A brilliant upper-middle-class student at an elite university conceived Facebook, and college students, as everyone knows, were its founding user group. The company hires recent graduates of expensive and exclusive design programs and pays them several times the going rate to brainstorm and execute exciting new features.

I’m not saying that these brilliant young designers are heartless, or that individuals among them haven’t personally experienced tragedy—that would be mathematically impossible. I have taught some of these designers, and worked with others. Those I’ve known are wonderful people who want to make a difference in the world. And in theory (and sometimes in practice) a platform like Facebook lets them do that.1

But when you put together teams of largely homogenous people of the same class and background, and pay them a lot of money, and when most of those people are under 30, it stands to reason that when someone in the room says, “Let’s do ‘your year in review, and front-load it with visuals,’” most folks in the room will imagine photos of skiing trips, parties, and awards shows—not photos of dead spouses, parents, and children.

So it comes back to this. When we talk about the need for diversity in tech, we’re not doing it because we like quota systems. Diverse backgrounds produce differing points of view. And those differences are needed if we are to put the flowering of internet genius to use actually helping humanity with its many terrifying and seemingly intractable problems.

If we keep throwing only young, mostly white, mostly upper middle class people at the engine that makes our digital world go, we’ll keep getting camera and reminder and hookup apps—things that make an already privileged life even smoother—and we’ll keep producing features that sound like a good idea to everyone in the room, until they unexpectedly stab someone in the heart.

1 Of course, not all my former students and employees work at Facebook; most don’t. But those who have gone there had other, equally lucrative options; they took the job to make Facebook, and maybe the world, a little better.

Designer Blindness

AFTER USING the web for twenty years, and software for an additional ten, I’ve come to believe that I suffer from an affliction which I will hereby call “designer blindness.”

Put simply, if an interface is poorly designed, I will not see the data I looked for, even if it is right there on the page.

On a poorly designed table, I don’t find the column containing the answer I sought.

On a poorly designed interface, I don’t push the right buttons.

On a poorly designed social sharing site, I delete my data when I mean to save it, because the Delete button is in the place most designers put a Save button.

This doesn’t happen to everyone, which is why I call it an affliction. Indeed, it happens to almost no one.

My non-designer friends and family seem quite capable of using appallingly designed (and even undesigned) sites and applications. Somehow they just muddle through without pushing the button that erases their work.

In fact, the less concerned with aesthetics and usability these friends and family members are, the more easily they navigate sites and applications I can’t make head nor hair of.

Like the ex-girlfriend who mastered Ebay.

Or the colleagues who practically live in Microsoft Excel, an application I still cannot use. There are tabs on the bottom, way below the fold, way past where the data stops? And I’m supposed to scroll a blank page until I find those tabs? It’s easy for most people, but it never occurs to me no matter how often I open an Excel document. I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn’t occur to me. Because, design.

It’s not a visual or mathematical disability. If something is well designed, I can generally use it immediately. It’s the logic of design that trips me up.

I recognize that I’m an edge case—although I bet I’m not the only designer who feels this way. Give me something that is well designed, and I will master it, teach others about it, and unconsciously steal my next five original ideas from it. Give me something poorly designed, something that works for most people, and I’ll drive a tank into an orphanage.

Not that I’m a great designer. I wouldn’t even call myself a good designer. I’m just good enough to get messed up by bad design.

Yet you won’t hear me complain about my designer blindness.

See, divorce is a terrible thing, but if you have a kid, it’s all worth it. The heartache, the anger, the loss of income and self-esteem, the feeling that no matter what you say or do, you are going to be someone else’s monster forever—all the unbearable burdens of failed love and a broken family are worth it if, before that love failed, it brought a wonderful child to this world.

For my daughter I would suffer through a thousand divorces, a million uncomfortable phone calls, a trillion emotionally fraught text messages.

And how I feel about my kid is how I also feel about my design affliction. The pain of being unable to use what works for other folks is more than compensated for by the joy of recognizing great design when I see it—and the pleasure of striving to emulate that greatness, no matter how badly I fail every time.

Broken All the Way Down: Seeking Basic Information from Southwest Airlines

I was taking my daughter to Laguardia Airport to meet her mom, who would then take the girl on to Chicago for a few days’ holiday-time visit. Laguardia is a large airport, with many terminals, and as I hadn’t bought the ticket and wasn’t flying, I didn’t know which of the many terminals to go to.

So the day before my daughter’s trip, I visited Southwest’s website and punched in the flight number. It is a recurring flight from New York to Chicago that takes place every weekday at the same time. The website told me that the flight had left for the day. It couldn’t tell me the terminal of departure or anything else.

Next I punched in the confirmation code for my daughter’s flight. Her mother had already checked her in, and sent me a digital copy of the boarding pass, which I needed to get through airport Security, and which also didn’t have a terminal or gate number—not surprisingly, since, even for a recurring flight, gates aren’t typically assigned until a few hours before the flight departs. I didn’t expect a gate, but a terminal would be nice. When I punched in my daughter’s confirmation code, there was still no sign of a terminal.

So I scoured the entire Southwest website. No mention of terminals anywhere.

I then used both Google and Duck Duck Go to run every query I could think of that might tell me which terminal or terminals Southwest departs from at Laguardia. Neither search engine was able to return anything of the slightest use.

I began to think that Southwest might have a problem with its markup, and its content strategy, and with any additional findability voodoo that usually gets called “SEO.”

Even maps of Laguardia and maps of airlines at Laguardia and records of flights from New York to Chicago and other Giles-like aracana I eventually thought of were unable to produce a tiddle of information about which terminal at Laguardia plays home to all or even some of Southwest’s flights.

When all else fails, call the company.

As you might expect by now, it took work to find Southwest’s phone number on its website, and when I did find it, it was one of those 20th Century mnemonic numbers that are hard to use and rather meaningless in the age of smartphones: 1-800-I-FLY-SWA.

You will not be surprised to learn that I sat through a long, unskippable audio menu full of slow-talking sales puffery before I was offered the chance to say “agent” and speak to an agent (which I needed to do since none of the menu options led to the information I wanted). After I said “agent,” the robotic voice told me, “Okay, I will connect you to an agent,” and hung up on me.

I went through this three times to make sure I wasn’t going mad and there was in fact no chance of reaching an agent.

To summarize so far: basic information not on company website or, apparently, anywhere on the web. Hard-to-use phone number did not provide info in its menu, and hung up every time it promised to connect me to an actual human agent.

So I used the contact form on the company’s website to ask my question (requesting an answer the same day if possible), and to report the usability problem on the company’s phone system, wherein if a human asks to speak to an agent, the system agrees to provide an agent and then hangs up on the customer.

Today—the day after my daughter’s flight—I received via email a form letter from Southwest apologizing for not getting me the information in time (and still not giving me the information), and advising me to solve my own problems in the future by using Southwest’s super-useful toll-free number for concerns that require immediate assistance.

I guess the person who sent the form letter hadn’t read the second sentence of my two-sentence request for help, where I mentioned that the toll-free number was broken.

Here, in its entirety, is Southwest’s response:

Dear Jeffrey,

Thank you for your email. We certainly wish we had been able to touch base with you prior to your travel. We realize how important it is to respond to our Customers’ concerns in a timely manner, and we regret disappointing you in this regard. For future reference, you may contact our toll-free number, 1-800-I-FLY-SWA, for concerns that require immediate assistance.

We appreciate your patronage and hope to see you onboard a Southwest flight soon.

Sincerely,

Wanda, Southwest Airlines

The file reference number for your e-mail is 255648215756.

You can’t make stuff like this up. The last sentence is my personal favorite. There’s nothing like a file reference number to cheer you up after experiencing failure at every customer experience point you touched.

I would not fly Southwest if it was the last chopper out of ‘Nam, but it is the best choice for my kid’s mom, and this is often the way with regional airlines, cable companies, and other businesses that have a lock on a particular set of customers: they succeed because their customers have few or no viable alternatives.

In the end, because my kid’s mom had shared the flight details, Tripit texted me the terminal information hours before I needed it. Terminal B, which is about two-thirds the size its needs to be for the amount of traffic it handles, was predictably mobbed with holiday travelers. There was not a free seat in the house.

Business is booming.

Design, user experience, customer service: whatever you call it, it seems some companies will only be driven to it when it is too late.