Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 142

What Happened to Your Old TV or Monitor

This is horrifying and quite damning of both technology companies and consumers (I’m as guilty as anyone else). The New York Times reports on the glut in recycled displays: Back in 2004 recyclers of old televisions and monitors were selling the glass in these discarded devices for as much as $200 a ton. The recycled materials would go into new cathode ray-based displays.

Because of the nearly total shift in the market towards flat screen displays, today it costs those same companies as much as $200 a ton just to remove the now unwanted devices. Naturally many of them don’t bother, and huge repositories of old televisions and monitors now sit in sometimes illegal quantities in warehouses. Worse, the owners of some of these businesses, cutting their losses, sometimes abandon them entirely, resulting in public health hazards; at one site the lead levels were seventy-five times the federal limit. Read the whole story.

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Pencil to Pixel

Coming to New York in May, an exhibition on the past, present and future of Monotype, the venerable “global provider of type, technology and expertise.” Tickets are free and can be booked now.

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Apps That Wow

Looks like the designer from “” got a job at Apple.

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(Originally posted on Twitter.)

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Reading into Google Reader’s Story

A lot has been written already about Google’s announcement that it will shutter its Google Reader product on 1 July. It’s a decision that has infuriated many, partly because when the company launched Google Reader in 2005, its free price tag undercut and then virtually destroyed the market for competitive products.

Soon enough, Google Reader had become a de facto industry standard, even as it became more and more apparent over the years that the company cared little for the market that it had come to own. As its hegemony endured, an ecosystem of Google Reader-based feed reading clients came into being, like a city that builds itself on an earthquake fault line. If you were in the market for an RSS client at any time in the past three or four years, you’d have been hard-pressed to find one that wasn’t based on Google Reader. So once it passes into the next world, Google Reader will leave in its wake few if any robust alternatives for consumers to choose from.

There are some important takeaways from this unfortunate history. First in my mind is the fact that Google Reader didn’t beat every other feed reader purely because it was free. Google Reader won because it was an extremely well-executed example of interaction design.

Features Don’t Add Up to Products

I’m choosing my words somewhat carefully here because I look back on Google Reader now as an example of a very particular type of design solution. To me it was something short of what we think of today as product design because its designers focused purely on optimizing for tasks, but not for the bigger picture.

Google Reader has always been good at the mechanics of adding new subscriptions, scanning read versus unread items, negotiating between folders, sharing items with other Google Reader users, favoriting items for later, switching views on the fly, and most of all letting the user zip through dozens of posts in short order. This was perfect for its core audience of extremely tech savvy feed consumers. If you were one of these folks, and you had an inventory of everything mechanical you might want from a mid-2000s feed reader, Google Reader was a wonderful solution. This intricate match of specialized needs and a specialized toolset, combined with the mighty weight of Google's computing infrastructure, and sweetened with the low, low price of free, made for a winning combination.

Learning to Read

But it was never easy to learn how to use Google Reader. Personally, it took me many attempts to finally acclimate myself to Google Reader’s very peculiar way of thinking about organizing feeds. I always found its conception of folders to be bizarre, for example; you couldn’t drag items between them and you couldn’t rename them.

The app seemed content with presenting one of the steepest learning curves of any browser-based software I can recall outside of the enterprise space. It did virtually nothing (or nothing effective, anyway) to help new users build a workable understanding of how RSS works and why they should use it. And it did almost even less to help those users build a mental model of how Google Reader itself worked.

This is exactly where I think Google Reader was a great example of interaction design but a very poor example of product design. The app shrank from the responsibilities that great products have to prioritize features for users and, most importantly, to omit what isn’t necessary. I mentioned earlier an imaginary inventory of feed reader features that a technophile might want circa 2005; Google Reader said yes to almost all of them. Just as importantly, it said no to not enough of them.

Meanwhile it never seriously accounted for the whole dimension of affordances that make a product attractive and visually intuitive, that imbue a product with humanity. It resigned itself to a presentation layer that was impenetrable for the lay user, and monstrously dense for every user. It called itself a reader but just to look at it was to see that it was curiously unreadable.

In many ways Google Reader was to me only the most evolved, Web-based evolution of the kind of design that Microsoft practiced for years: design that predicates itself on a high bar of user expertise. In the case of Microsoft’s Office products, they virtually demanded that new users read the accompanying manuals before it was possible to do the work you set out to do. In the case of Google Reader, it was virtually expected that you read all of the blogs that were then engaged in the then-current meta-narrative about blogging and syndication and all that nonsense before you could read the feeds you were actually interested in.

All that said, I eventually did learn to master Google Reader’s many peculiar ins and outs, and I came to rely and even become quite attached to the product. It’s still one of the apps I turn to most often on my computer and, through the excellent Reeder app, on my iPhone too. My biggest complaint is not that it was imperfect, but rather that it never evolved. As incomplete as it was as a product, I can’t reiterate enough how I really believe that many of its low-level interactions were executed with aplomb. Had its parent company deigned to invest a bit of care into it, it could have turned into something truly wonderful.

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Back to Blogging

It’s no secret that this blog has been operating at a reduced pace for some time now. I’m struggling to post much of anything, and I’m utterly failing in writing the kind of stuff I would like to be writing: longer and (hopefully) more substantive essays than what’s been posted recently, the kind that I used to turn out regularly.

And it’s hardly the case that I’ve been stumped for topics to post about, either. To the contrary, all sorts of blog post ideas continue to occur to me at all times. Often I’ll start mentally drafting them, anticipating a free moment when I can type them out and turn them into real posts that get published on this site — you know, like a blogger would do. But then a very busy day goes by, and two or three more, and before long the post no longer seems timely or unique and the moment is gone.

 

Back during the peak of my blogging, it used to be that I could spend a few hours after dinner hammering out five or ten somewhat coherent paragraphs, several nights a week. It took a lot of discipline, but mostly it required time. That all seems to have receded far into my past now, when I was much younger, frankly.

As you get older, free time usually becomes progressively rarer. But in the past several months, I’ve barely been able to stitch together even fifteen or twenty free minutes a day — thanks in no small part to the changes that have happened in my life. Any one of these changes might have made for decent blog fodder, but they all happened within the space of just a few short months and together conspired to rob me of almost all of my unclaimed time.

To start, we sold Mixel to Etsy in January, and I’ve spent the past eight weeks acclimating to the culture and my new responsibilities at my new employers. That in itself would make for at least a few posts; there are stories I would like to tell about the whole Mixel journey, especially its end, as well as thoughts I’d like to publish about our acquisition and what life has been like at Etsy.

Then there’s the house that Laura and I just bought, and all of the excitement, pressure and confusion of owning a building of our own, from basement to roof. There’s probably not all that much about this subject that’s particularly interesting to readers of this blog, but all of the time I spend driving to and from Home Depot is time I could theoretically be spending on this blog.

Finally, there’s the big one — or the big two, to be exact: the birth of our twin boys in January and the attendant, total upheaval in our lives. We are very lucky to have these two wonderful, healthy kids, but either one of them, even on their own, has been much more demanding than our daughter was when she was an infant — and there are two of them! They have been absolutely unceasing in their need for attention, food and care, and as a result I find myself continually exhausted, wanly coping with the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation.

 

Still, I miss this blog, and the act of writing regularly for it, and all of the feedback and conversation that it makes possible. When I started out blogging, I never would have expected to have such a long, continuous (if not consistent) run. I’m not ready to give up on it yet.

Sometimes, too, the longer you go between writing blog posts, the harder it is to get back into the swing of things. I know that as I’ve tossed more and more of those mental drafts onto my imaginary scrap heap of post ideas, the more important the next big blog post seems like it has to be. It’s gotten to the point now where I feel like I couldn’t possibly just write any old post without at least mentioning the tremendous stress of selling a company and starting a new job with the acquirer, the exhilaration of assisting in the delivery of my second and third children, the trepidation of closing on a new home purchase, the whirlwind of packing up an apartment rife with sentimental baggage, and the nervous jitters of moving to a new neighborhood — preferably all summed up in one lavishly detailed, momentous essay.

That’s never going to happen, obviously, at least not with the schedule I’ve been keeping these days. What I really need is to write a blog post that clears the decks, one that owns up to how starkly impersonal my posts have been for months now, and essentially gives me permission to start trying to write again. So here it is. Those other posts will come — I have too much to say about these various topics to punt on them altogether — but for now I’m just going to try to start blogging again.

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Samurai Chair

Designed by Seo Young Moon.

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Pantone Pairings

I could tell you to spend all day poring through the seemingly endless list of incredibly witty ideas by designer, illustrator and art director David Schwen, but for the best of his body of incredible work, check out his series Pantone Pairings. Here are just five samples:

There’s more at Schwen’s site.

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Igloo Software Feed Sponsorship

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