Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 4

Broken Blossoms

Children with abusive family members cannot protect themselves. It’s awful when the whole family witnesses their pain and humiliation, and worse when the abuse goes on in secret. During and after each crime against them, the children blame themselves. Their genes scream to trust and forgive what their minds know is wrong. 

When they should be learning how the world works, instead they craft intricate and absurd explanations for what is happening to them, or else escape into comforting creative play. The lucky know that their creative escape worlds aren’t real. The unlucky can’t always tell. 

As these children go out into the world, other children, sensing their damage, shun, mock, and bully them. Instead of comfort and growth, the world outside the home reinforces the message that they are hated, inferior, and deserve nothing but violence. If they belong to a despised minority, their genetic identity can become part of their explanation for why these things keep happening to them.

Years pass. Their minds and bodies mature, but their spirits never catch up. No matter how deeply they bury their shame, their damage makes them meat for future predators. If they’re lucky, they find partners who secretly understand and want to help them heal. But cunning predators often pretend to be healing helpers, and some wounded spend their lives mistaking one punishing narcissist after another for their love savior.

Should the walking wounded find true love with an equal partner, they will almost certainly lose it. Therapy can help them understand why they keep making the same mistakes, but only rarely will it lead to true change or the possibility of lasting happiness.

Some wounded eventually choose to live alone. The luckiest start families and treat their children as they themselves should have been treated. Raising loved children is the only consistent and lasting healing some will know. For me, it has been enough.

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Strange Beliefs of Childhood № 99

Between 6th and 7th grade, my friends turned against me. It was as if everyone else had turned cool and teenaged over the summer, while I remained a child.

After years of close friendship and admiration, my pals’ cruel jokes and new meanness not only hurt, they were weird and baffling. To make sense of it all, I concocted the fantasy explanation that my parents must have secretly been paying my friends to be nice to me during the previous years …

… and that they must have somehow run out of cash as I entered seventh grade, causing the other kids, who were no longer on the payroll, to show their true feelings toward me.

What strange things did you believe?

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What happened to the Share button in Zoom?

Zoom has always included a clickable button/badge at the top left of its primary meeting interface window. Click the badge to copy the URL of that meeting. You can then, with just one more click in any messaging system, send that URL to the other meeting participants. Fast. Simple. Drop-dead easy. Elegant.

It comes in especially handy when people didn’t get (or didn’t see or for some reason can’t click on) the meeting link in their invite. Or when the meeting link is hidden behind a tab behind a tab behind a tab in their browser. Or for any of a dozen other reasons you might want to grab the URL of a meeting you’re in, and zap it to a colleague.

How wise are the designers of Zoom to have solved this problem!

And talk about usable! The button’s placement at the top left of the meeting window, with plenty of free open space around it, means that any user (regardless of software experience level) can quickly find the button when they needed it. It’s placed right where your eyes know to look for it.

Good design! Smartly focused on what’s most important to the user.

So, anyway, Zoom seems to have removed the button.

—As I discovered during a Zoom meeting with a colleague 30 minutes ago. (Or, more accurately, a Zoom meeting without that colleague.)

—Who texted me to request the Zoom URL. But I couldn’t send it to them. I couldn’t send it, because I couldn’t see it, because the interface was hiding it.

—Because Zoom has decided to remove that affordance, replacing it with… well, nothing, actually.

It is possible that the affordance still exists somewhere within the Zoom interface, in some gloomily cobwebbed, rarely visited subscreen or other. Possibly with a rewritten label, so that any Zoom customers lucky enough to find it will fail to recognize it, even if staring directly at it with the fixed gaze of an astronomer.

I don’t say Zoom has definitely removed one of the nicest (and possibly, in its humble way, most important) tools their product offered. I don’t say that because I can’t be sure. I merely say, if they haven’t removed this function, they might as well go ahead and do so, for all the good its hidden presence does for Zoom’s millions of users. If the tool is hidden somewhere in the deep background layers of Zoom, I sure couldn’t find it.

So, after wasting time hunting for and texting about the missing Zoom link affordance (here comes the punchline), my colleague and I ended up holding our Zoom call…

… in Google Meet.

If I were a Zoom executive or investor, this might worry me.

Offered with love, UX is hard, and not all decisions are in our hands.

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One weird trick

They say should manage down. You’re supposed to manage the people who work for you. For many people who become leads, it’s the toughest and least satisfying part of the job. This is especially true for people who become leads primarily because they’ve been on the job longer than the people around them—not because they had a management jones to satisfy.

They also say you should manage up—subtly assert control of the people you work for. Help them stop short of a bad idea and find their way to a better one. If you can manage up without being obvious about it, you just might save your job, your boss’s job, and your team’s work. 

And yet—

Management goes only so far.

The pains of managing up and down are better than the pains of not being able to manage at all. If you swear by managing up or down, I’m not here to discredit you, nor would I dream of doing so, nor would I have cause.

But I am here today to ask you to also try thinking a different way.

Do keep helping people, whether you work for them, work with them, or they work for you.

But don’t think of it as managing them.

Think of it as helping a colleague, just as you’d help a friend, a family member, or (when you’re at your best, and when it’s safe) a stranger.

Help to help, because we’re built to help. We feel better when we do it.

Life is not a contest. At least, it doesn’t need to be chiefly or primarily a contest. If you request feedback and I provide it, what counts is that it helps you. My position versus yours within this particular hierarchy doesn’t matter. The best idea can come from anyone.

Hierarchy matters at times, sure. But not most of the time. Most of the time what matters is showing up, doing your work, and helping others do theirs. 

Have a better day!

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Designer Jonathan Lee

Meet Jonathan Lee

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The gift of a three-month sabbatical

It was late winter when my sabbatical began, and it’s late spring as it comes to an end. Next week I return to my post after three months’ paid leave, courtesy of Automattic’s sabbatical benefit. Three months. A season. With full pay, and zero work responsibilities. In a job full of rewards, this is perhaps the greatest perk. Here’s why:

You work for so much of your life that your time passes in a blur. You don’t even notice it hastening by until someone or something calls your attention to a past milestone. 

And then suddenly, into this rushing blur, comes an uncanny gift: back-to-back days that are yours, to do with as you choose. For a long enough period of time that your work brain quiets. For the first time in years, you have a chance to reflect on who you are, and where you are right now. To see where you’re going, and consider whether it’s still the right destination for the person you’re becoming. To think about who’s traveling with you.

During my sabbatical, I was able to renovate my apartment and rid it of books, furniture, and clothing I no longer need. Without three months to call my own, I would never have had the insight to seek these changes, let alone the time and energy to implement them correctly. 

And because I had time, loads of it, three big swollen months of it, I was able to make these moves calmly and judiciously, instead of rushing anxiously, bungling things because I had to make snap decisions, and regretting the mistakes for years. 

The gift of time also let me and the people I care most about look at ourselves, rejoice in all the good, and sand down a few rough edges.

Thanks to the sabbatical, I also tripled my daily steps. Admittedly, I started from a low step count because I am still recovering from Long COVID, and because I am slightly arthritic (age, old injuries), and because I tend to sit in my chair for huge swaths of physically inert hours, speed typing and mousing and forgetting to get up and get out. My father was always working, and so have I been. And I’ve let my anxiety (always a problem, but worse after COVID) turn me into a chair-bound workaholic, even though I know better. 

I do not blame my job for the way I’d let myself run down. The job encourages us to have balance in our lives. I ignored that advice. But when I return to work, I will follow it. Because of this time in which I have luxuriated as if it were a warm bath, I have built new health habits that I will carry forward into my return to work.

I’ve even made some mature (and long overdue) decisions about what and how much I share online. Again, it’s all thanks to the amazing gift of this sabbatical. (Forgive me if following some of the older links here or on my disparate social feeds leads you to dead ends.)

I plan to use my next sabbatical for traveling, but I’m thrilled with how I spent this one, and I will always be grateful for this wonderful gift of time.

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Ah yes, the famous “intern did it” syndrome

Soon after we launched A List Apart Magazine, we began to notice other websites reusing our content (including illustrations) without permission, and often without so much as a credit. As that violated our author’s copyrights and ours, we’d invariably reach out to the makers of those websites with brief, politely worded takedown requests. 

Not every content poacher was contactable, but those we did reach almost always quickly complied with our requests. They also nearly always claimed that an “intern” or “freelancer” had grabbed the content without their knowledge or permission. Some, perhaps fearing that we might be litigious, even went so far as to tell us that they’d “fired” the imaginary intern/freelancer the instant we informed them of the issue.

We always pretended to believe them.

Why? Because letting embarrassed people save face is kind. It also helps the whole interaction go more smoothly. Besides, the amateur pillager claiming “the intern did it” today may be your colleague or friend tomorrow.

I recalled this common awkwardness yesterday after a former US president who’s running for reelection blamed Nazi language in his social media post on a “staffer.” It would seem the buck stops anywhere but here.

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Indigenous

The definition of “Zionist” that I’ve always used is a person who believes the Jews deserve a state where they can be safe. That is something I believe. I also believe the Palestinians deserve a state where they can be safe, the Israeli occupation has been a disaster and Benjamin Netanyahu needs to be replaced.

As for the suggestion that Jews, or more precisely Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis — those of European heritage — should book a one-way ticket to Warsaw, I realize it’s not a point of view representative of the whole of the protesters on U.S. campuses. Yet it is undeniably a reflection of the “settler colonialist” position on Israel, a narrative that has gained traction despite more than half of Israeli Jews being Mizrahi — that is, from the Middle East. Palestinians and Israelis are two Indigenous peoples occupying the land that is being fought over.

—Have we learned nothing? by Seth Greenland, Los Angeles Times

Also available from Apple News

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Suckage begins here: why search engines now prioritize advertising over good UX

This kind of virtuous rising tide rent, which benefits everyone, doesn’t last. Once the growth of the new market slows, the now-powerful innovators can no longer rely on new user adoption and collective innovation from a vibrant ecosystem to maintain their extraordinary level of profit. In the dying stages of the old cycle, the companies on top of the heap turn to extractive techniques, using their market power to try to maintain their now-customary level of profits in the face of macroeconomic factors and competition that ought to be eating them away. They start to collect robber baron rents. That’s exactly what Google, Amazon, and Meta are doing today.

— Tim O’Reilly, Rising Tide Rents and Robber Baron Rents: The Replacement of Organic Search with Advertising by Google and Amazon and What That Might Mean for the Future of AI

See also:

The Man Who Killed Google Search by EDWARD ZITRON:  This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. (Hat tip: mORA.)

Search Party (2009): Triple Issue No. 292 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is all about search. By JOHN FERRARA, AVINASH KAUSHIK, and LOU ROSENFELD.

Illustration: Kevin Cornell

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This Web of Ours, Revisited

ONE MONTH and 24 years ago, in “Where Have All the Designers Gone?” (my HTMHell design column for Adobe of March 20, 2000), I discussed the deepening rift between aesthetically focused web designers and those primarily concerned with creating good experiences online:

More and more web designers seem less and less interested in web design.

Over the past 18 months or so, many of the best practitioners in the industry seem to have given up on the notion that a low-bandwidth, less than cutting-edge site is worth making. Much of the stuff they’ve been making instead has been beautiful and inspiring. But if top designers wash their hands of the rest of the Web, whose hands will build it, and whose minds will guide it? The possibilities are frightening.

An Imperfect Medium for Perfectionists

Why were many of the leading graphic designers and studios at the time uninterested in web design? For one thing, designers trained to strive for visual perfection found the web’s unpredictability depressing. The article provided clues to the frustrations of the time:

Good designers spend hours tweaking typography in Illustrator and Photoshop. Then visitors with slow connections turn off images.

Of course, where professionals trained in graphic design saw a distressing lack of control, others glimpsed in the infant technology a tremendous potential to help people, pixel-perfection be damned. To reduce the conflict to a cartoon, you might characterize it as David Carson versus Jakob Nielsen—though doing so would trivialize the concerns of both men. Designers already charged with creating websites found themselves somewhere in the middle—barking themselves hoarse reminding clients and managers that pixel-perfect rendering was not a thing on the web, while arguing with developers who told designers the exact same thing.

Visually inspiring websites like K10k showed that the web could, if approached carefully and joyfully, provide aesthetic delight. But many designers (along with organizations like AIGA) were unaware of those sites at the time.

Us and Them

Another source of tension in the medium in 2000 sprang from the discrepancy between the privileged access designers enjoyed—fast connections, up-to-date browsers and operating systems, high-res monitors (at least for the time) offering thousands of colors—versus the slow modems, aging and underpowered computers, outdated browsers, and limited-color monitors through which most people at the time experienced the web.

Which was the real design? The widescreen, multicolor, grid-based experience? Or the 216-color job with pixelated Windows type, a shallow “fold,” and pictures of headline text that took forever to be seen?

To view your masterpiece the way most users experienced it, and at the syrup-slow speed with which they experienced it, was to have an awakening or a nightmare—depending on your empathy quotient. Some designers began to take usability, accessibility, and performance seriously as part of their jobs; others fled for the predictability of more settled media (such as print).

A New (Old) Hope

My March, 2000 article ended on an upbeat note—and a gentle call to action:

For content sites to attain the credibility and usefulness of print magazines; for entertainment sites to truly entertain; for commerce sites and Web-based applications to function aesthetically as well as technically, the gifts of talented people are needed. We hope to see you among them.

That was my hope in 2000, and, all these years later, it remains my vision for this web of ours. For though the browsers, connections, and hardware have changed substantially over the past 24 years, and though the medium and its practitioners have, to a significant extent, grown the Hell up, beneath the surface, in 2024, many of these same attitudes and conflicts persist. We can do better.

Minus the framesets that formerly contained it, you may read the original text (complete with archaic instructions about 4.0 browsers and JavaScript that broke my heart, but which Adobe’s editors and producers insisted on posting) courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

☞  Hat tip to Andrey Taritsyn for digging up the article, which I had long forgotten.

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