Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 42
September 7, 2013
The Lords of Vendorbation
Vendorbation
ven·dor·ba·tion
/ˈvendər-ˈbā-shən/
noun : Unusable web-based intranet software foisted on large populations of users who have no say in the matter. For example, the “dynamic” website for your kid’s school, on which you can never find anything remotely useful—like her classroom or the names and email addresses of her teachers. Merely setting up an account can be a Borgesian ordeal minus the aesthetics.
Tried updating a driver’s license, registering a name change after a marriage, or accomplishing pretty much any task on a local, state, or federal website? Congratulations! You’ve been vendorbated. In ad sales? In publishing? Travel agent? Work in retail? Y’all get vendorbated a hundred times a day. Corporate America runs, not very well, on a diet of dysfunctional intranets sold by the lords of vendorbation.
Terrible food kills a restaurant. Terrible music ends a band’s career. But unspeakably terrible software begets imperial monopolies.
Wholesale contractual vendor lock-in between vendors of artless (but artfully initially priced) web software and the technologically unknowing who are their prey (for instance, your local school board) creates a mafia of mediocrity. Good designers and developers cannot penetrate this de-meritocracy. While they sweat to squeeze through needle’s eye after needle’s eye of baffling paperwork and absurd requirements, the vendorbators, who excel at precisely that paperwork and those requirements, breeze on in and lock ‘er down.
Vendorbation takes no heed of a user’s mental model; indeed, the very concept of a user’s mental model (or user’s needs) never enters the minds of those who create vendorbatory software. I say “create” rather than “design,” because design has less than nothing to do with how this genre of software gets slapped together (“developed”) and bloated over time (“updated”).
Vendorbatory product “design” decisions stem purely from contingencies and conveniences in the code framework, which itself is almost always an undocumented archipelago of spaghetti, spit, and duct tape started by one team and continued by others, with no guiding principle other than to “get it done” by an arbitrary deadline, such as the start of a new school year or the business cycle’s next quarter.
Masturbation, or so I have read, can be fun. Not so, vendorbation. It is a nightmare for everyone—from the beleaguered underpaid lumpen developers who toil in high-pressure silos; to the hapless bureaucrats who deserve partners but get predators instead; from the end users (parents, in our example) who can never do what they came to do or find what they want, and who most often feel stupid and blame themselves; to the constituents those users wish to serve—in our example, the children. Will no one think of the children?
Cha-ching! Like a zombie-driven un-merry-go-round spinning faster and faster as the innocents strapped to its hideous horses shriek silently, the vendorbation cycle rolls on and on, season after bloody season, dollar after undeserved dollar, error after error after error after error in saecula saeculorum.
Think it’s bad now? Wait till the lords of vendorbation start making their monstrosities “mobile.”
Doff of the neologist’s toque to Eric A. Meyer, whose cornpensation helped crystalize what to do with the bad feelings.
August 30, 2013
Chicago, Chicago
AN EVENT APART Chicago—a photo set on Flickr. Pictures of the city and the conference for people who make websites.
Notes from An Event Apart Chicago 2013—Luke Wroblewski’s note-taking is legendary. Here are his notes on seven of the ten presentations at this year’s An Event Apart Chicago.
#aeachi—conference comments on Twitter.
Chicago (Foursquare)—some of my favorite places in the city.
An Event Apart Chicago—sessions, schedule, and speaker bios for the conference that just ended.
AEA Chicago 2013 on Lanyrd—three days of design, code, and content on the social sharing platform for conferences.
THE NEXT AEA event takes place in Austin and is already sold out (although a few spaces are still available for the full-day workshop on multi-device design).
A handful of seats are available for the final event of the year, An Event Apart San Francisco at the Palace Hotel, December 9–11, 2013. Be there or be square.
August 28, 2013
Research Engine Optimization
IN ISSUE No. 381 of A List Apart for people who make websites:
Connected UX
by AARRON WALTER
Your inbox overflows with customer emails suggesting features and improvements. Instead of benefiting, you feel overwhelmed by an unmanageable deluge. You conduct usability tests, user interviews, and competitive analyses, creating and sharing key insights. Yet within months, what you learned has been lost, forgotten, or ignored by someone in a different department. What if you could sift, store, and share all your customer learning in a way that breaks down silos, preserves and amplifies insights, and turns everyone in your organization into a researcher? MailChimp’s user experience director Aarron Walter tells how his team did it. You can, too.
Seeing the Elephant: Defragmenting User Research
by LOU ROSENFELD
Silos: good for grain, awful for understanding customer behavior. Just as we favor the research tools that we find familiar and comfortable, large organizations often use research methods that reflect their own internal selection biases. As a result, they miss out on detecting (and confirming) interesting patterns that emerge concurrently from different research silos. And they likely won’t learn something new and important. IA thought leader Lou Rosenfeld explains how balance, cadence, conversation, and perspective provide a framework enabling your research teams to think across silos and achieve powerful insights even senior leadership can understand.
August 13, 2013
Vision & Flow: ALA 380
IN Issue No. 380 of A List Apart for people who make web sites:
Getting to Flow
by BREANDÁN KNOWLTON
Projects go much better when you and your client are in a flow state. But how can you get there? Breandán Knowlton believes the conditions for creating good work aren’t a mystery, and that with a few thoughtful changes you can make those conditions more likely to occur on your next project.
Defining a Vision: Making Sure Your Work Matters
by RUSS STARKE
Knowing how temporary digital creations can be, how can we ensure our work matters? By defining a vision for the organization. Russ Starke explains.
August 9, 2013
How Tweet It Is: An Event Apart DC in 140 Chars
IF YOU MISSED An Event Apart DC, here’s your chance to glean nuggets of knowledge shared by attendees at the event.
August 7, 2013
Deep Thoughts
Flat design is destroying the woodgrain background industry.
— Jeffrey Zeldman (@zeldman) August 6, 2013
Reality 2.0
GOING TO BE SAD when all these social networks I’ve been pouring my life into get shut down by basic economics or bought by Yahoo.
July 31, 2013
Zeldman Quarterly No. 1
#ZEL01, MY FIRST CURATED gift for Quarterly subscribers, has dropped. It contains a book of classic Blue Note jazz LP record cover designs, a jazz LP record (each recipient gets a different one), a framed Mondrian print inspired by that artist’s first encounter with jazz, and a letter from me telling the story behind the gift box.
ZEL01 is all about constraints, a topic close to my heart. When I began designing websites, we had four fonts, one language (HTML), and 16 colors to play with. It wasn’t much … only enough to make magic.
The gifts in ZEL01 exemplify the magic of constraint, reflected through the lens of jazz: from Reid Miles’s two-font, one-spot-color album cover designs for Blue Note records—classics we still turn to for inspiration, more than 50 years after their release—to Piet Mondrian’s jazz- and street-grid-inspired “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” spun from right angles and primary colors.
Thanks to Nora Johnson and her staff at Quarterly for indulging my curatorial whims, and to you early subscribers for believing. I hope you like the package. Another gift comes soon.
There are still four weeks left to subscribe to ZEL02 and future gift packages.
July 25, 2013
Thursday
ME: Why’s your girlfriend’s sweater on the back of your chair?
MALE OFFICE MATE 1: It’s my sweater.
MALE OFFICE MATE 2: He’s Metrosexual.
ME: I experimented with that in college.
Build Your App offline first: Jake Archibald of Google Chrome on The Big Web Show
IN EPISODE No. 95 of The Big Web Show (“everything web that matters”), I interview Jake Archibald of Google Chrome about upcoming web caching standards, how the network connection is merely a layer of progressive enhancement and why you should build your app offline, communicating with non-developers, accessibility standards at BBC and The Guardian, the forking of Webkit, and why the much-linked article “Why Mobile Web Apps are Slow” proves no such thing.
Jake Archibald is a Developer Advocate at Google working with the Chrome team to develop and promote web standards and developer tools. Prior to Google, Jake worked on lanyrd.com/mobile/, using modern web standards and good old hackery to work smoothly on ancient devices, while adding enhancements to newer devices such as offline support.
Jake also spent 4 years working at the BBC writing low level JavaScript that catered to their strict accessibility and browser support requirements. He authored and maintained the corporation’s Standards and Guidelines on JavaScript, and sat on their working groups for accessibility, markup, and download performance.
URLS
jakearchibald.com
@jaffathecake
Jake Archibald on Github
Jake Archibald on Google Plus
Jake Archibald
Why Mobile Web Apps Are Slow
Web Platform Daily
Feedly RSS Reader
Daily Nerd
jQuery requstAnimationFrame
Navigation Controller (Github)
Application Cache is a Douchebag (A List Apart)
Note
The Big Web Show will be on hiatus during August. See you in September!
