Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 84

Foreknowledge of things trivial – or, the lamentable desk clerk.

I KNEW THAT MORAL PIPSQUEAK of a desk clerk would forget my wake-up call. Knew it, knew it, knew it. When I told him our room number and said we'd need a wake-up call at 7:00 AM, and he said, "No problem, sir," but didn't look me in the eye and didn't repeat my room number or the requested time, I knew what I had told him would not lodge in his small, distracted brain. Knew he would forget. Knew, knew, knew. And sure enough, there was no wake-up call. If my internal clock hadn't alerted my unconscious, causing me to have nightmares about adultery, I would not have awoken and we would have missed everything.

Because that bloody teenage desk clerk didn't give a shit and is going on to bigger and better things someday and this is a nice hotel that subsists on a prep school parent business and wasps don't complain when fucking desk clerks fuck up their wake-up calls. (Wasps never complain; they just quietly buy your company to destroy it, or, with a mere gesture, make sure your kid never gets into the university she's qualified to attend. But I digress.)

Might have missed our morning appointment. Might have missed our train. But desk tosser cares fuck-all and will never be called on it. Certainly not by me. I'm not going to be the one guest here in 100 years who complained. ("Did you hear? The man in Room 211 actually lodged a complaint." "No, really? I thought there was something, well [John Cleese eyebrow gesture] about him.")

And I knew when he didn't meet my eye that he was not going to write down anything, not going to take care of it. Knew when he said, "No problem, sir," like the thing he wasn't even going to bother to do was a favor to me instead of his job. Knew from his fucking haircut.

But I didn't want to be the jerk who says, "Would you mind repeating my room number and the time I've requested?"

If I'd done it, the fucking prick would have done his job and my phone would have tinkled at 7:00 AM on the fucking dot.

But to do it, I'd have to be a testosterone-fueled middle-aged self-entitled business prick, and I'm not that. Not externally, anyway. I pride myself on being nice. Or stoic. Or self-effacing. Or something. They gave me lollipops for it at the pediatrician's. What a good little patient, didn't even cry when the harelipped nurse jabbed him over and over again. You could see his little eyes watering but he didn't say a word and didn't even complain to his mother. Have a lollipop, you've earned it, son.

That's the deal I've made with life. I'm nice. I don't confront. I don't demand. I don't judge, at least not publicly, except right here where I'm publicly judging jurying and executing this poor pimply fuck of a desk clerk. Who, had he raised his eyes, would have seen a harried traveler and his adorable, exhausted daughter. And if he possessed an ounce of desk clerk skill or even a jot of humanity, le clerk manqué would have smiled and exchanged a pleasantry with the little girl—bringing a moment of real human connection to the simple business transaction of setting a wake-up call, which he would have been sure not to fuck up, because you don't want to disappoint or inconvenience a nice little family like that.

Now I understand how Laurence Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy.

Anyone still here? So the moral, I guess, is two-fold: 1.) Trust your judgement, and if you know the desk clerk isn't paying attention, exert the necessary moral pressure. 2.) Create a web app that tracks hotel wake-up call failures (or help someone add this feature to a check-in app) because it's a real problem for business travelers. Who are probably smart enough, unlike me, to travel with clocks.

P.S. The iPad alarm clock app failed also. La de da.

Et tu, Jon Stewart?

The iTunes Store now features a Daily Show app. When you click to purchase it, the store tells you it doesn't exist/isn't available under this name.

Apparently, Apple or MTV Networks has withdrawn the app—and the news never made it to the database. How is this possible?

The error message indicates that the app "may be available" with a different price or "elsewhere on the store." Neither of these possibilities turns out to be true.

Imagine a shoe store with special shoes highlighted in the window. When you try to buy them, the clerk says you can't, but they "may be available" elsewhere in the store for a different price.

Somewhere, Steve Krug is quietly weeping.

Top Web Books of 2010

"It's been a great year for web design books; the best we can remember for a while, in fact!" So begins Goburo's review of the Top Web Books of 2010. The list is extremely selective, containing only four books. But what books! They are: Andy Clarke's Hardboiled Web Design (Five Simple Steps); Jeremy Keith's HTML5 For Web Designers (A Book Apart); Dan Cederholm's CSS3 For Web Designers (A Book Apart); and Eric Meyer's Smashing CSS (Wiley and Sons).

I'm thrilled to have had a hand in three of the books, and to be a friend and business partner to the author of the fourth. It may also be worth noting that three of the four books were published by scrappy, indie startup publishing houses.

Congratulations, all. And to you, good reading (and holiday nerd gifting).

Anatomy of the Goodreads.com Friend Spam Dark Pattern

"Goodreads.com is social cataloging service for books. In this post you will see how they've used the friend spam dark pattern, but how they've also failed to make it go viral. This makes it interesting to carry out a post mortem and work out what they should have done."

—Anatomy of the Goodreads.com Friend Spam Dark Pattern

(Hat tip: Andrew Travers.)

Touch-based App Design for Toddlers

As always, Luke Wroblewski nails it:  

When kids interact with software they explore and engage with anything that looks interesting. Especially if it looks like content. Graphical user interface components don't.

Consider the example of Dr. Seuss's ABC book on the iPad. The intro screen uses colorful blobs to bring attention to large hit targets. But tap on one of these elements and up pops a standard modal menu asking you to select from one of three options. Modal menu dialogs and kids don't mix.

More at lukew.com.

Wikileaks Cablegate Reactions Roundup

Andy Baio helps us make sense of Wikileaks by providing an absolutely brilliant roundup of facts, coverage, personal responses, and visualizations from around the world.

Andy is a journalist/programmer living in L.A. He works at Expert Labs, helped create Kickstarter and Upcoming, and has made an album, among other things.

Dr. Seuss does Star Wars

Enjoy!

Hat tip: Erika Hall

NYC Must-See

People who are coming to New York for the first time always ask me what they should see. So I've made a little list. Here are eighteen of my favorite places in New York City.

Cure for the Common Webfont, Part 2: Alternatives to Georgia

For nearly fifteen years, if you wanted to set a paragraph of web text in a serif typeface, the only truly readable option was Georgia. But now, in web type's infancy, we're starting to see some valid alternatives for the king of screen serifs. What follows is a list of serif typefaces that have been tuned—and in some cases drawn from scratch—for the screen.

Stephen Coles, December 6, 2010:

Cure for the Common Webfont, Part 2: Alternatives to Georgia

Episode 30: Jason Santa Maria

JASON SANTA MARIA (website, Twitter) will be our guest Thursday December 9th, 2010 during Episode No. 30 of The Big Web Show ("Everything Web That Matters"), co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and recorded at 1:00 PM Eastern before a live internet audience.

Jason is a self-described Graphic Designer living in sunny Brooklyn, New York. He is the founder and principal of the design studio Mighty, creative director for Typekit, a faculty member in the MFA Interaction Design program at SVA, co-founder of A Book Apart (Brief Books for People Who Make Websites), vice president of AIGA/NY, founder of Typedia, a shared encyclopedia of typefaces online, and creative director for A List Apart for people who make websites. A former designer and creative director at Happy Cog, Jason has worked for clients such as AIGA, The Chicago Tribune, Housing Works, Miramax Films, The New York Stock Exchange, PBS, The United Nations, and WordPress, "focusing on designing websites that maintain a balance of beauty and usability."

The Big Web Show records live every Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!