Howells.

Last week I swung by to say hello to the Taylor Pemberton and the rest of the New York-based creative team behind Wantful: a new startup that aims to reinvent the way in which you buy gifts for friends and family online.

This is how it works:

You select who you’re buying a gift for. Let’s say I’m buying a birthday present for my girlfriend. You are then asked to answer a few lifestyle questions about that person in a very simple, visual way the reminds me of Hunch. The questions attempt to generate their taste profile. One of the questions asks you to judge the person’s taste in style on a continuum: a series of products laid out and photographed beautifully.

Once the profile is complete, Wantful presents a series of products that they might like. You can select a budget, from $30 to $500. In my example, it generated quite a few very tasteful food-related gifts (which is pretty appropriate), and featured items that I’m certain she would like, and which I might have bought for her ordinarily.

From the list, you select 16 products, or you can have them generate a random selection for you. These items are then compiled into a customisable book, which is shipped to the recipient. All they need to do is pick a product, return to the website, enter a code, and the item is then shipped to them, without revealing its cost.

The system is smart, and the website (and recipient’s book) is beautifully designed. I managed to steal an example of the booklet and it’s packaged in a handsome, quality embossed envelope printed by the same firm that prints Apple’s collateral.

One criticism that I’ve heard levied against the idea is that it is impersonal. That may be, and I wouldn’t really use it to buy a present for my girlfriend or anyone very close. But the market is still enormous: the wedding and corporate markets alone provide a compelling opportunity, and ultimately the idea might become so mainstream as to be acceptable. Ultimately any service that helps the recipient get something they might actually want is a good thing: I dread to think of how much all the unwanted, discarded gifts cost each year.

Beyond the fact that the site and product is beautifully designed, another key to its success will be the quality of the items on offer. Since they are gifts, the products on offer must always be high quality and consistently so. Flash sale sites like Fab or Gilt don’t have to worry about this (though they really should if they are to remain relevant): they simply need to flog as much junk as possible with tiny margins.

I’m excited for the company, and with $5.5m in Series A funding I think we’ll see interesting things happen with them very soon.

☛

I find myself tweeting occasional opinions about responsive web design without painting a bigger picture of my actual view on the current state of responsive design. Usually crossed-wires ensue, people get offended, some get heated, and others start trolling me hard.

So I thought I’d take this opportunity to pull together some thoughts I have about where we are on the topic. I’m deliberately not going to link to few other resources, or name any names, because frankly there is so much content and opinions to read about responsive design that pointing out specific view points this early on is useless.

I’m also going to sound quite uninformed and ill-read on the topic. That’s because I am quite uninformed and ill-read: I try to avoid most articles and opinions just to try and form my own ideas. That said, as someone who has taken the time to read this (and therefore who cares about it), I would love to hear your own opinions on the matter and hopefully I can integrate them into this post and help it evolve into something more solid and useful.

An Ill-defined Bandwagon

I attend quite a lot of web design conferences (or at least I used to: most are now repetitive and offer little more than an elaborate Smashing Magazine blog post). Almost without exception, speakers deliver the same message: everything you do must be responsive. They demonstrate this by showing off their latest work, which looks pretty and technically well executed.

But often the examples are not real-world, large-scale, commercial projects: they are personal blogs, or for products/services that require just a few pages of content. While that’s great, and does point to a future where every site responds well to the device it is being viewed on, they aren’t sites that comprise tens of different template styles, or feature myriad types content.

Rarely this message is delivered with any caveats. The amount of effort to both design and develop responsive sites takes a great deal more time and money since you’re effectively designing one, two, or three more websites, depending on which breakpoints you decide is appropriate. (And what a luxury it would be to have the time, resources, and money to create large-scale responsive sites: most of us work on projects that don’t.)

The same speakers often talk about how denying that the future of interactive design is akin to denying global warming (someone said this once, I can’t remember whom), while others say that if you don’t design (and develop) with responsiveness in mind, “you can’t call yourself a web designer” (I know who this is, but won’t name names).

This last message infuriates me particularly for a few reasons. Firstly it was written by someone who is employed by an agency that seemingly has produced almost no responsive sites: at least none that appear in their portfolio, and secondly it must be incredibly disheartening if this is read by someone just starting out in the industry who has only just got their head around basic CSS and Javascript. And I don’t need to talk about the problem we have with education and encouraging new people to join the industry.

Responsive Design is Hard

The fact is responsive design is hard. For new designers and developers, it is very hard. I know my way around CSS and Javascript fairly well, and even I struggle a great deal getting my head around some of the finer points of responsive design. (Not least since there appears to be twenty different ways and self-styled best-practices to approach the problem.)

Because it is hard, many responsive sites are very poor. They are led by a need to have their practices accepted by web celebrities and popular thinking rather than delivering a quality product. The bandwagon that everyone is jumping on is very ill-defined, and the results are less than satisfactory. Even as I type this, the bandwagon is in flux, given the onset of responsive images thanks to retina displays that if rumour have us believe, will be more commonplace than just iPads later this Summer.

Anecdotally, none of my non-web-industry-friends actually like when sites resize and fit to their phone. It goes against the mental model they have of their favourite websites. They find it frustrating since suddenly, sections are missing and the navigation is pared down or removed entirely. Further, I have never met a client who is in the least bit impressed when you sit in front of them, resizing the browser again and again (I’m certain that it’s only us lot who actually does that).

In conclusion

Of course I’m not denying that responsiveness shouldn’t be considered when you start a new project. This site is responsive, for instance, because it suits the content: simple written text. But for a vast majority of the sites I work on, making them responsive would cost a huge amount of cash and take a lot longer to implement. I don’t want to force a client into investing in thinking or a practice that is still quite immature.

But if responsive design is a fundamental requirement, I would suggest taking some of Jakob Nielsen’s advice (I feel I’m the only person who agrees with this, however). Until we know how to make site usefully responsive, give the user an option to experience the full website.

I’d like to see designers and agencies should stop just talking about the tools and techniques of responsive design, and focus on how responsive design is woven organically into the fabric of real-life, practical, and well-executed projects. The designers and developers who consistently create great responsive sites don’t shout about it just to be heard or to attract new clients; it just forms part of their daily output. These are the leaders who are ultimately going to determine what constitutes good responsive design, and who will define the bandwagon.

The first session of the 99% Conference which I attended last week was a session with Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham. If you don’t know USV, you’ll know about their portfolio: Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, among a handful other network-oriented startups. It’s worth understanding the principle criteria for USV investments to digest the advice he gave the gathered crowd. They invest in large networks of very engaged users, defined by user experience, and which are defensive against network effects. They look for novel and differentiated networks: they won’t, for instance, won’t fund an Pinterest clone.

Brad’s talk centered on the weird economics of networks, and how they behave and are defined in fundamentally different ways to industries defined by the products they create. Networks don’t create a product: they behave much more like governments in that they provide the infrastructure on top of which the network can thrive. Instead of building roads and transport links, network companies handle the physical technical infrastructure, but also the tasks like spam control and manage user policies.

Network companies play on enabling efficiencies. Craigslist destroyed $17bn of value from incumbent, industrialised companies: i.e. newspapers. All Craigslist do with a team of about 20 is connect the endpoints: the users perform all the work. They cost next to zero to start, and Brad references Foursquare that garnered 100k users on just $25k. Tumblr has never spent a single dime on marketing. New features are deliberately hidden as easter eggs, and they leave the dissemination of the platforms functional value to its most influential users (“Hipster bloggers in Williamsburg”, he suggests).

Here are a few nuggets of solid advice fro the talk:

• You don’t always need to consider the monetary return from a user handing their data over to your network. A real-world corollary is the fact you wouldn’t throw the host of a dinner a couple of bucks after you’d eaten; the benefits of the dinner party are less tangible in the same way that your product’s benefits might be.
• Think really carefully about the core group that might initially be interested in your network. Twitter was founded by the attendees of SXSW; Facebook by Harvard students. Think carefully about the physical attributes of your userbase and what their needs are, rather anything all-encompassing.
• Don’t lose sleep over a major incumbent swooping in on your idea. (Read: Google.) Big companies are amazingly inefficient. An incumbent often can’t mobilize or incentivize their staff in the same way a very focussed team of hackers and designers.
• Even if your startup is knocked down by an incumbent, only your investors lose: you won’t. By building a product and going through the processes it demands means you are picking up extraordinary experience and connections. The time you spend on working on your product is never wasted: you will always come out stronger for it, regardless of the outcome.
• What USV looks for in a startup isn’t always easy to define. What they do look for is a team of people who are very well-versed and proficient in both code and design (David Karp of Tumblr): they are not looking for “day-trippers”: someone with an investment banking background is unlikely to be successful in creating a consumer-facing social network.
• Before approaching a VC, they want to see evidence of growth and traction. And if you are getting growth and traction, they’ll likely hear about it and approach you before you need to approach them. So focus your efforts on traction.
• Don’t overplay the importance of ad revenue in your pitch. If ad-revenue plays a very large part of your pitch, it starts to look less compelling. This may not be true however if your product or network plays to a very specific niche or consumer.
• Further to this, advertising was created for television and magazines: advertising was never created for the web (and effectively doesn’t work), so re-consider what you mean by advertising revenue; consider new approaches.
• Don’t approach a VC until you show commitment. It’s unlikely you’ll have a VC believe in you if you don’t believe in your product. You can demonstrate commitment by leaving your day job and spending your time focussed on the product. There are exceptions: Delicious was founded by Joshua Schachter while he worked at Morgan Stanley. Yet he demonstrated commitment by being willing to walk away from his $350k-per-year Quant analyst job to focus on his product.
• Ultimately it costs nothing to create a product. At least do something with your idea, however basic.

Brooklyn-based designer and developer Jonnie Hallman (a.k.a. Destroy Today) said in a recent interview:

I like the idea of making an application and just building it for yourself first. Because then it’s successful no matter what because it makes you happy. If it reaches 100,000 users that’s great; that’s just a bonus though. But if you’re able to use it years down the line, that’s the ultimate goal.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as I try to get another project off the ground, called Shorthand. It’s a link-sharing and commentary tool that I’m building because I haven’t yet found a link repository tool that I genuinely like. Delicious is horribly over-complex and and over-designed, and Pinboard–as much as I love the rationale behind a completely utilitarian bookmarking tool–doesn’t fill me with any pleasure whatsoever.

So Shorthand is in essence a tool that I’m building just for myself.

There will be a social layer that spans the application, but the most important thing is that the tool will work well for a user-base of one.

This is a different approach to how people approach building web apps in that most web apps are built for a user-base of 30million (to use Instagram’s figure)., because ultimately that is what will sell when the tool gets acqui-hired. This is how I approached building Fiftytwo, since it’s value is derived from a group of people showing their work and feedback to others.

But the best pieces of software and tools are built with a very single-minded purpose, for only a single individual. This is how a hammer is designed, and few have ever complained that a hammer doesn’t quite satisfy a user’s needs.

If you bear this in mind when building a product, you’ll reap two main benefits:

• Lifecycle testing a product becomes directly relevant. Using the tool again and again and again throughout development and making it work perfectly and enjoyably for just yourself means the tool has been built correctly and has achieved its goal already, regardless of however many people end up using it.
• The product will work without the catch-22 situation of requiring a broad user-base from the get go. Of course, some products demand this (dating websites, for instance) but if you look at your product, there will almost always a way to simplify it such that the benefits can be enjoyed by a single user using it alone.

(Incidentally in the interview, Jonnie also talks about killing old projects, and moving onto new things, which echoes my recent post about doing lots of things.)

I have been sitting on the theme of this post for a while, but I stumbled across two great articles recently that convey my point quite brilliantly. I’ll talk about their ideas, and then cover it off with a few opinions of my own.

Firstly, while browsing General Assembly’s site, I came across On Learning to Code, pt. 1 by Mattan Griffel, a strategy guy from New York City:

When I first quit my job to start my own company, all I had was an idea. The goal at that point was to find someone with a technical background to actually execute my idea. I suspect that many of you are in similar situations. There’s something you should know: it’s never going to happen.

…

Please don’t want to wait around trying to find that perfect technical co-founder. If that’s your goal, then you’re bound to fail as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs don’t look for people who are able to execute for them. They improvise and make things happen in spite of being under-equipped.

…

Very quickly, society is becoming divided into two groups: those that understand how to code and therefore manipulate the very structure of the world around them, and those that don’t – those whose lives are being designed and directed by those that do know how to code.

(He subsequently turned it into a Slideshare deck, which is well worth a browse.)

Secondly, Spencer Fry–founder of Carbonmade–wrote a great piece on his blog, From Business Guy to Programmer:

While being a successful Business Guy can be tremendously important for the company, and has more impact than many developers and designers acknowledge, there are times when you cannot contribute to the product as much as you’d like. In the meantime, the makers seldom have a free moment, as a product can always be improved. A new design tweak here. A refactor of code there. The Business Guy is left with an internal struggle: wanting to do all they can do for the company but knowing deep down inside that pulling out a code editor or Photoshop would often be the most helpful thing they could do — and realizing they can’t do it.

…

It’s at those times when an hour in code or design is what’s needed that I’ve wished I hadn’t stopped programming so that I could fire up a code editor and hack away. It’s that feeling of always wanting to contribute to the most critical part of the company at any given time that has returned me to programming.

Spencer’s article touches on my reason for wanting to learn development. I go into this in more detail in a blog post I wrote for Offscreen magazine. 10 years ago, some friends and I wanted to create a website when the idea of a “startup” was barely known, and in fact was a time when people barely used the internet. We knew no programmers or designers, yet I relished the challenge to learn something during my down-time doing my psychology. (Spencer–who switched to psychology from computer science–is right: you get a lot of free time if you do a psychology degree: I would recommend doing and liberal arts-based programme to any aspiring hacker for that reason alone…).

The feeling of being able to execute an idea through to a finished project is enormously satisfying. I admire designers who are also proficient screen printers, or fashion designed who cut their own cloth; who conceive an idea, creates the product (and perhaps even sell) within the remit of her own skillset. It’s really exciting to see a product come into being by yourself.

Of course, it won’t be perfect. I’m not a great developer nor a great designer, and luckily I’m not a perfectionist (at least not when I’m doing client work). That doesn’t matter - it’s the doing that counts. And if the product or idea is a winner, that’s when you bring in a team of experts to help polish it into something great. But because you were the person pulling the initial pieces together, you have more context and knowledge to sell your idea and get people to believe in it, and subsequently, you.

In my mind you need two things to become a nerd. Time, and an idea. That’s all: no specific knowledge or expertise. I didn’t know nor was taught about development or design when I started.

People who complain they don’t have time are paradoxically procrastinating. If it’s something you want, you’ll find the time to do it. Get up an hour earlier, or go to bed an hour later. Hack away or read about hacking away during your lunchbreak.

Then comes the idea. It needs to be simple, but it needs to be something you want to see (something you find useful or which entertains you). It also needs to be something that excites you, since with excitement comes will. If you’re not excited about something, you’ll get bored and give up pretty quickly.

You may need a bit of a kickstart. I’m thrilled that General Assembly has set up in London, and they have a super range of talks and courses to get you started. In fact you might decide to do a full front-end development course with my genius pal Rik Lomas. There are equivalent courses in New York, and I’m certain you can find courses in other cities.

If not, then seek out a nerdy community who will inspire and motivate. If you’re a designer, I wouldn’t choose to attend the nearest Ruby Hacker Group, but increasingly there are groups of folk who span creative and code. In London, check out Dalston Digital; in New York, check out N.Y.P.D who I believe occasionally have meet-ups. Everyone at both is super friendly. If they’re not, tell me and I’ll kick their ass.

Conferences are great too, and are as bountiful as biscuits these days. Brooklyn Beta is an especially good one, who this year are running Brooklyn Beta Summer Camp: an amazing opportunity to get involved with a super crowd of people. $25,000 is a great motivator to learn how to develop while executing your idea.

However you start you’ll get immense satisfaction, even if you find it daunting. Give it a try, it’s fun being a nerd.

I caught up with a friend of mine the other day who works in the industry at a prominent and successful startup. And he told me about something that really frustrated me about the web design industry.

As one of the best designers I know, he has been put in charge of a group of designers as a creative director. The only problem is, he can’t call himself a creative director.

That seemed odd; I asked him why.

It turns out that the group of designers have such big egos that they hate being managed and directed by someone with many years of experience over them.

Traditionally, creative directors at any company have tended to be the most experienced, who have risen the ranks by doing great work and being able to handle egos deftly; leading by example. (That’s probably an idealised notion of meritocracy, but you get my point.)

But the internet has changed that quite fundamentally, because these guys were defining themselves and their worth essentially by their ranking on Dribbble (who are all highly regarded players), not by the work and contribution they were offering the team.

I’m not hating Dribbble - it’s a great tool to find talent of quite a specific aesthetic which the web seems to be aligning to right now. And if you get your work hearted, that’s awesome. If you get really liked, with loads of lovely comments, that’s even more awesome.

My biggest advice for any designer would be to leave their pride at any echo-chamber’s gates. The web is much bigger than a single community or platform, and it’s full of people with far greater experience and knowledge who don’t care who is ranked higher than who. Many won’t even know what Dribbble is, or come from unusual backgrounds. Yet these are the people who are probably defining the next web aesthetic paradigm shift, so it’s a good idea to seek them out, listen to them, and learn.

This is not a big industry, and the demand for web designers outstrips supply like you wouldn’t believe, as you probably know. If you’re good, we’ll know about it. But you’ll never be the best designer, however many hearts and comments you have. The best designers adapt and change all the time.

A little confidence in your work goes a long way, a lot of ego goes nowhere.

There are now a billion articles and tweets about the Instagram acquisition (one for each dollar spent by Facebook, interestingly). So I’ll keep my thoughts on the acquisition brief:

• Facebook is full of awesome people. I know a few of them, and they work hard to build an unbelievably good product. How the product is used and by whom is an entirely separate issue. Remember that every time you criticise the product (not the community), think about the folk that are part of our industry who make it.
• Facebook owning Instagram in and of itself is not the sad part. The sad part will be when they monetize Instagram: when I’m shown an ad for the first time will be the last time I use it. This is especially sad since I’d be more than happy to pay a few bucks per month for the app, or as a one off (a la Instapaper). Until then I’m still going to use it. It’s a great product, and I can export all my photos out of it whenever I feel the need.
• Whomever criticises the guys for selling the company to Facebook is a fool. You and I would both sell our product for $1bn. If you don’t think you would, don’t kid yourself.

Finally, here’s a sensible and insightful Quora answer from Scoble about the why element to the acquisition.

Before I start any sizeable project I create a data model. I do this way before I open up Illustrator, Sublime Text, or any other tool, and usually before I have made any notes or sketches.

Anecdotally speaking, this is at odds with the design process for most others but it’s a technique that works well for me. It helps structure, inform, and shape an idea into something very tangible, very quickly.

It helps piece objects together, mapping relationships in a very visual way. And this is an important point since my mind doesn’t seem to want to comprehend anything technical unless I can see it in the form of a diagram.

The image above is a small snippet (part of a much, much larger diagram) of the data model for Creative Journal which I am in the middle of re-developing alongside a much more complex project called Shorthand, which I’ll write about soon. I use SQLEditor to create these diagrams which is a tool I have used for many years. I’m sure there are hundreds of other similar/better applications available but this works well for me, and creates database/Rails schemas dynamically which is a huge convenience.

Doing this data-mapping exercise then informs the next stage: physically designing the application in Illustrator. Having some the thinking around how objects fit together helps enormously. You know which attributes need to appear where for a given object. As a very simple example, if you have an object called “User”, which has all sorts of attributes that form the application you have a laundry list of design elements that need to be pieced together on the page. And then if this User is associated to many Categories, for instance, it’s then then next piece of the puzzle is to consider how these related elements fit on the page. (Creating a data model helps with with solving far more complex problems than this, however.)

Ultimately the data model guides the visual design process, rather than the visual design process informing the data model. It means you and your team mates understand the fundamental structure of the project from the outset and help avoid discovering missing pieces during development.

Concept models championed by Dan Brown are another superbly useful tool if the idea isn’t clear or needs to be fleshed out before creating the data model. A concept model is a series of nouns connected by verbs (a user uploads a photo).

These two Hacker News threads have been keeping me entertained today.

In a nutshell, “super hero” Dustin Curtis released an interesting new blogging engine called Svbtle, which he opened for only a select handful of “vetted” bloggers. This perceived arrogance obviously didn’t go down well with a number of Hacker News regulars; in particular Nate Wienert who cloned the platform, called it Obtvse, and open-sourced it on github for anybody to fork.

I’ve read a number of comments on either side of the argument for and against this move but I think some people have misinterpreted Nate’s move. He didn’t set out to create a copy of the app for commercial gain; he has simply made a point about the way in which the app was launched, its tone of voice, and the general attitude that surrounded its launch.

I enjoy Dustin’s blog and twitter, and he usually delivers some fascinating points-of-view and unearths some great content. Yet fundamentally, I have no idea who he is or what sort of work he has done, other than redesign an airport boarding card, and create lifepath.me (I can’t find references to either, but you probably know about them). Both are admirable design endeavours, but fundamentally neither attribute him with the monicker of “super hero” which he tells us he is at every opportunity. A super hero in my mind (and in our industry) is somebody who is genuinely awesome at what they do, but who are humble about their achievements: Jack Dorsey and Jeff Veen come to mind. I’d imagine neither would ever call themselves a super hero, with however much irony.

My second point is essentially a reflection on copying others’ work. I’m sat painfully on the fence here. For instance, on one hand I find Pinspire an embarrassing, cynical attempt to pull the rug from under Pinterest’s feet (and an equally embarrassing comment on the state of the European tech scene, but that’s for another post), and copying the idea along with the pixel-for-pixel design just to quickly be acquired is not cool. The same goes for hot-linking CSS styles and Javascript files which cropped up recently.

Yet on the other hand I see hundreds of design rip-offs whilst searching for new interesting posts for siteInspire. The fact is, a copied site or idea is clearly a copy whose quality is almost always dreadful, and in my opinion is usually little more damaging than a fake Gucci handbag bought in a Hong Kong market. I have even had the entire siteInspire design ripped off with hilarious consequences. I was flattered, and just passed it off as someone’s attempt at learning by rote: a fairly ineffective but acceptable learning technique, but which is usually the motivation for these rip-offs. I mentioned it to them, but didn’t demand for it to be removed with such vehemence that a lot of “victims” do (they were sufficiently embarrassed to take the site down anyway).

If you find that your site or application has been copied, see it as feedback. In Dustin’s case, he can learn a huge amount from the episode. His reaction to the news wasn’t great and reflected on him poorly, such that he subsequently redacted and replaced it with an opinion on stealing designs. I think it still suggests he misunderstood the motivation for Obtvse and hasn’t learnt much from it.

In everyone else’s case, a general rule of thumb is to first be flattered. If it’s just a bad copy it won’t do you image any harm, and if it’s a much, much better copy… well there’s quite a lot to learn from that too, however frustrating it might be.

I suspect this is a controversial topic and I’d love to hear your thoughts: especially if your work has been copied; what you thought about it and what happened.

Update 1: Frank Chimero wrote a wonderful comment on copying.

Update 2: Chris Shiflett writes about an important observation on Hacker News. While for the majority of the people this is true, I would guess that as a self-styled super hero Dustin quite relishes the attention on Hacker News, having been a front-pager many times.

The mistake the Hacker News community routinely makes is to assume the author of whatever they read is making a big deal about something.

As I’ve made pretty clear before, I’m not too bothered about the latest craze for skeuomorphic design in UI. Obviously I dislike it, but think we can only go upwards from here.

But the other reason I’m not bothered about is because heavily skeuomorphic design has never failed me. It’s always obvious what button or other real world simulacra to push or drag to achieve a desired action.

That was until today, when I had to painstakingly merge two iCloud accounts. I had to import my contacts from an old account to a new one. Importing and exporting contacts from the various accounts wasn’t a problem, but figuring out had to manoeuvre the newly imported contacts to the new account was completely beyond me. There was no obvious option to choose from the menus, nor any buttons.

So it was to my surprise that thing I had to do was to click on the red, fabric tassel in order to filter and manipulate the groups and accounts.

Under no circumstances was it obvious that I should have even clicked on that thing. I thought it was a piece of decoration, not a fairly core and functional UI toggle.

So if you ever have this problem to deal with, now you know to click (not tug, drag, tease, or flip) the red fabric tassel.