Interface Geography

I enjoyed the question Christopher Butler opens up for consideration in this post. Is it time to remap the territory of interface design? He begins with a description of software design I'm very familiar with.

We can count on the elasticity of the brain. The perceived topography of digital spaces -- how users actually navigate them -- often bears little resemblance to their intended architecture. Users create their own mental maps based on use patterns, memory, and intuition. A button might be "up there" in a user's mind, even though the interface is a flat plane. A frequently used feature might feel "close," regardless of how many clicks away it actually is.

I disagree with his suggestion, though, for how we could move best practices forward.

But perhaps it's time to move beyond physical metaphors entirely. Game designers have long created navigable digital spaces that don't correspond to physical reality, yet feel perfectly natural to traverse. What if productivity software took cues from game design? What if we stopped pretending our interfaces resembled physical spaces and instead embraced their unique properties? We need a new pattern language for digital space.

It's a fun thought experiment. But it makes a big, common mistake. Or a pair of them. It centers the entire premise on one kind of person, a young video game player. You could probably guess other narrower characteristics. If your user base is only that one kind of person, and your business model does not rely on growing beyond that person, then go for it. That's not true of many applications, and fewer which intend to one day grow. The reason we design our software according to familiar, real world mental models is because we are human beings who live in the real world and this is the existence we know. The reason we prioritize accessibility according to A11y best practices is because software which works for everyone works for anyone.

The challenge isn't how we might teach human beings to reorient themselves according to new geometry. The challenge is in solving interface design problems which people can navigate without learning much new.

In my opinion, software works best when the borders between it and the real world are as dissolved as possible. Familiar patterns work because they work. The most durable patterns are those which we've been using for centuries. Or, better yet, thousands of years.

No harm in taking the moment to reconsider, though, as Butler does. At any given time, the paradigm may change. We should be ready for it. An actual paradigm change is actually on the way with hands-free, AI voice interfaces. That's new, as far as computers go. But it's also not a new mental model. It's an even older one! Maybe the oldest. The spoken word.

Anyway. I appreciated thinking about this. At the end Butler says, "The enduring importance of place in human experience suggests that spatial thinking will always be part of how we understand and interact with information." So he hasn't fully convinced himself of his own argument. He has shown me how much its worth keeping the question alive.

Design as Art

Bruno Munari in Design as Art:

The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing. Instead of pictures for the drawing-room, electric gadgets for the kitchen. There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use. If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall have nothing to hide.

Anyone working in the field of design has a hard task ahead of him: to clear his neighbour's mind of all preconceived notions of art and artists, notions picked up at schools where they condition you to think one way for the whole of your life, without stopping to think that life changes - and today more rapidly than ever. It is therefore up to us designers to make known our working methods in clear and simple terms, the methods we think are the truest, the most up-to-date, the most likely to resolve our common aesthetic problems. Anyone who uses a properly designed object feels the presence of an artist who has worked for him, bettering his living conditions and encouraging him to develop his taste and sense of beauty.

I don't apologize for having a high-minded approach to my work in product design. I'm a laborer, and my output, if done well, is the bettering of my colleagues working conditions. [In that my job is to design the editorial tools used by the newsrooms in my company.] I like to think I do this well, and that's what gives me the most satisfaction at the office.

Kripal Interview in RD

From Religion Dispatches:

Laycock: Can you succinctly explain your theory of why impossible things happen and have always happened?
Kripal: Because this is what a human being _is_. The human being experiences "the impossible," because the human being, everywhere and always, is not the culture and history of the place and time. We exceed and exhaust our historical conditions, each and every worldview, _no matter what it is_. This is also what I mean by the "Human as Two." I don't mean there are two substances. I mean that _we are the splitters of reality_. We cognize, perceive, and imagine that there are "subjects" and "objects," but this is an illusion created by our very existence, by our very cognitions, perceptions, and imaginations. Reality is actually One, and until humanists can say that, we will not be heard. We will be ignored. And we should be.

I missed that Jeffrey Kripal had a new book out last summer, How to Think Impossibly. His career-long project on investigating the real versus the experienced is fascinating. This means talking a lot about the supernatural, though I often take his perspective as a means for making sense of persistant erroneous data of any kind. Sometimes the things which make the most sense logically are just not human enough for people to enjoy, or understand, or accept. Achieving the humanity in a project is really the goal, by which I mean the feeling of being alive.

Why All the Ranking

Jill Mapes, in Hearing Things:

The hierarchy of ranking music is a dude thing, an inherently anti-feminist approach: this is what some of my smartest women friends in music journalism say, and after years of doing it down to the decimal point, I have to agree. This is a subjective artform that, for me at least, is highly connected to memory and emotion. I don’t know how to write about or even listen to music while putting those parts of myself aside. There’s no unified theory of Good Music that creates an easy rubric by which to judge a song or album. It’s based on gut feeling, and educating yourself on music as much as you can, in order to understand what came before as you look forward.

I’ve never liked the idea of ranking art. It’s a goofy way to share the things you think are beautiful, or meaningful, or important, etc. That’s why I just use two groups to share. 1) I liked these records a lot! 2) These other records are also good! And I suppose a third group would be the records which were fine but not that impressive and but what’s the point of sharing those?

Trent Reznor on Music in Culture

Reznor then clarified, "I'm not saying that as an old man yelling at clouds, but as a music lover who grew up where music was the main thing." Concluding, he added, "Music [now] feels largely relegated to something that happens in the background or while you're doing something else. That's a long, bitter story."

This is one reason I keep thinking of blogging a lot more about music. It would be amazing if we could find a way to again center our culture on music. The arts in general, but especially music. I want to read more music reviews, more interviews with musicians. Music is life for me. Sure, I often listen while I'm doing something else, but I also do a lot of active listening, too. 

Work Notes

Every work day, I start my note-taking with a simple template.

## [meeting name]
- note

## [meeting name]
- note
- note

## To Do
- [ ] thing to do

## Notes
- things I did
- things to remember
- random thoughts

## Launched
- listing finished/shipped things

Having a regular template helps to be sure I'm capturing everything I should be.

The first thing I do in the morning is choose two or three high priority tasks I need to complete before end-of-day and add them here. Not every To Do; only the most important ones. Other stuff will naturally get done.

Notes from each meeting are grouped under a header. Important info. Links to shared docs. Ideas I have. New tasks to do. People to contact later. All those things.

Then a Notes group which I usually fill out at the end of the day. Here is where I journal what might not have been captured above in the meeting notes. Important sidebar conversations I had with colleagues. Tracking company news. Personal feelings on how the day went. Etc.

The Launched group is to track anything significant we finished designing or shipped to production. It's good to have this for reference. Especially for later reference. You can control-F search the doc to look back on when a thing was done.

Which reminds me that an important part of this is appending each day's notes to a Work-Journal.txt file. It's a record of everything and has been so so helpful when I need to know when I did something, or had a particular convo with someone. The journal goes back years, and is a rich document of what I've accomplished and learned over that time.

eXodus

If you're reading this, and you're still on X, I'm kindly asking that you leave. It is no longer Twitter. It's a sister site to Truth Social, Gab, and 4chan. If you do not have a good reason to have accounts on those sites, you do not have a good reason to stay on X.

If you've already left, thank you.

I left two years ago and I'm fine. The last time I legitimately logged in to read my feed was October of 2022, the week Musk bought it. I deleted my account permanently the night before Twitter officially became X. I'm on both Mastodon and Bluesky, and they're ok. They're unquestionably better than whatever it is Twitter has become.

One thing I'd love to see Biden do in his remaining months in office is to pull every official account from X and formally write that decision into policy. When Twitter was an open site that allowed people to follow accounts for important, potentially life-saving information, it made perfect sense to post there. It is now actually harmful in that hurricane warning alerts are sandwiched between racist memes posted by Musk and Hitler-praising posts by some no-name bluecheck.

Obviously, that official position would be immediately reversed by Trump. But the ensuing media storm around the decision would be worth it. We'd get a news cycle explaining why the US government will no longer post to X, and then a second news cycle explaining why Trump would reinstate those accounts on a Nazi website. Even if nothing really changes in the end, that's a lot of words and air time spent explaining to the American people exactly what kind of website X is.

Elon Musk spent millions of dollars to reelect Trump, and spent the night at Mar-a-Lago celebrating their win. If you yourself would not have attended that party, you should not continue to visit its online counterpart. X is now a functional extension of the new Trump Administration. There are better places to be.

How I Internet Now

I'm coming up on almost 30 years of being a citizen of the internet. The shape of the web has gone through some wild changes in that time. A lot has also stayed the same! I thought I'd take a moment to document how connected I am to the WWW in 2024. And apparently I'm not the only one taking stock of this. Chris Glass posted something similar recently, in response to another blogger he follows. A lot is changing online in 2024. I think many of us are rethinking our relationship to all of this.

Reading

Most of my reading online takes place in two places: Feedly and Instapaper. RSS is the heart of it. A few times a day, I run through the feeds, either reading posts and articles then and there or saving them to Instapaper to read later. It's a ton of personal websites, a bunch of current event mags like The Atlantic, Vox, New Republic, or The New Yorker, and also your general newspapers like the NYT, WSJ, Guardian, Washington Post, Le Monde. And then dozens of other blogs/sites focused on design, home and decor, tech, culture, art, etc.

I rarely watch videos online, but I do save some things to my Watch Later tab on YouTube. I mostly forget that exists.

Personal Website(s)

With the latest iteration of this site, I've made a significant change. I've separated my personal life from my professional. My design work can now be found on a separate domain: brianfeeney.design. I chose this for two reasons. First, I wanted a more direct link to my portfolio which could be 100% my work. And second, I wanted my personal site to better reflect my personality outside of the office. I'm the same person whether at work or home. But as for design and presentation, there is a distinction.

This website is intended to be a repository for all the things I make for fun. It's also where I post in lieu of social media sites. Having grown up in the era of personal websites — weblogs ... blogs — that's the internet I most cherished. It's the internet I'd love to see flourish again. RSS is the social media I most appreciate; it's the purest form of posting and sharing. Everything which came after may be more advanced, but it isn't better. It may be easier, but it's not quite as personal. At this URL, you'll find my writing, my photos, my music (when I eventually post some), my shared links and favorite media, etc. I love seeing what other people share on their own sites, and, in a way, having a personal website is a way to repay the favor, should anyone care to stop by.

BrianFeeney.design is my professional portfolio, my online resume. As such, it's designed to be a bit more buttoned up. That's to reflect the kind of work I do. At least, the work I've done so far and expect to continue to do. When you hire me, you're getting design that's human, colorful, empathetic, joyful.

Twitter

After the 2020 election, I was pretty much done interacting with posts on Twitter. I was still addicted to reading it, but I stopped tweeting, retweeting, liking things, etc. That was my way of weening myself off of it. I think it worked, because when Musk bought the thing in October of 2022, I was able to log out and walk away cleanly. As the site crumbled and curdled into its worst possible self, I missed it less and less. The night before Twitter became X (July 2023), I exported my 16 year old account and nuked it. @bfeeney was empty for about a month before a teen (or bot) named Brandon reactivated it. He's following 1 person and has not yet posted.

Mastodon

This is the better Twitter replacement. Or, to be more precise, the Fediverse is, running on ActivityPub. It feels the most natural, somehow. You can find me there at [email protected], an account I created while at the XOXO conference in Portland in 2018. In the months following the death of Twitter, most of the web-making folks in my circles moved to Mastodon; developers and designers, but mostly developers. It's stayed mostly an engineers space due to it's geeky internet-edness. That's a shame, but perhaps Threads joining the Fediverse will give it some life. I don't really post there, but I'd like to. Maybe one day I will start that up.

Bluesky

On Bluesky, I found most of the journalists, writers, lawyers, and shitposters I had once followed on Twitter. It seems poised to become the Global Town Square which Twitter aimed to be, if anything ever will. It's biggest drawback is that it's built on a different protocol than ActivityPub, and so I suspect it to devolve into another Social Media Company like all the rest. Maybe that's ok? I don't know. But I don't really feel like posting there. I'm just lurking. I'm feeney.bsky.social.

LinkedIn

I'm there and I'll connect with you if we're friends or have worked together. Not once have I enjoyed browsing that site's feed. Not once have I posted. It has a really weird culture. Business!

Pinterest

Still such a great site. I really love it. I kinda wish it was more social somehow, but perhaps if they did pivot that way I'd hate it. I like saving visual stuff that inspires me. Art, illustration, photography, furniture and architecture, graphic design, etc. My account is here.

Instagram

I peruse my account there maybe once a month via iOS Safari. I stopped posting in 2018. Nearly all but a few of my friends stopped posting there, as well. It was the best social media site for awhile. Now it feels abandoned to the Influencers.

Facebook

I deactivated my account there in maybe 2018? It was falling into the same hole Instagram had, which leads one to think its issues come from management at the top. Bad decisions somewhere by Zuck and his C Suite. At one point, I was really disgusted by Facebook's gross misuse of data, which is one reason I closed my account. These days it's clear that everyone everywhere is abusing your data, so holding it against Facebook feels like a fools brigade. I think a lot of my family is still there, which makes me think one day I might go back. My principles stand against it is feeling less effective now. So we'll see.

Tumblr

It's great. I barely use it at all. But it's great. Some people still use it like it was 2014, spinning up specialty blogs sharing art and memes and other highly directed subgenre/fandom stuff. I mostly read Tumblr blogs via RSS, though. I've kind of been using my account to post funny images I come across, stuff i want to share but don't feel like putting on my own website. You can follow that junk at briancfeeney.tumblr.com.

Slack

I'm also in six different Slack communities. My participation in those (non-work Slacks) is minimal, but far more active than any other social social media. The private nature of those is comforting, and I'm more free to be goofy or more myself. For awhile there, it seemed like Slacks were growing to replace all social networks for most of us, but that time came and went. I’m appreciative to be a member of the ones I’m in. There’s something nice about that. Human. 

Craft CMS Going Strong

Brandon Kelly, a founder of Craft CMS, posted this to Mastodon on Jan 1st of this year:

Mind-blowing stat to kick off 2024: @craftcms is now the 7th most popular CMS among the top 5K domains worldwide, according to Cloudflare's 2023 trends report.

And Greg Storey added his commentary:

It is a remarkable achievement for the products they create, their product strategy (the products they don't create), and their obvious commitment to the thousands of people who create these top five thousand websites with Craft. [...] Folks, this is the Internet I signed up for! This is exactly the type of business story I want to see, read, and hear more of in the years to come. It's a great reminder that the independent web is still alive and kicking, and poised for a strong comeback.

I really like Craft. It's the CMS I've used for this site since maybe 2012? I'm pretty sure Craft was still at Version 1, and it remains, at Version 4, a very reliable and flexible CMS. Admittedly, I sometimes wonder if I should migrate to something else, but reading that Craft is flourishing is enough to convince me to stay. It's easy enough to develop for, and the community around it is friendly and helpful. They've really earned their success.

The Sliding Scale of Giving a Fuck

Dan Mall reminded me of Cap Watkins' great post, The Sliding Scale of Giving a Fuck. I hadn't thought of it in awhile, though it did become a fundamental aspect of my design process. The gist is that you should take into consideration how strongly another person feels about their position in an argument or discussion when deciding a way forward. It's a very useful factor to consider for maintaining healthy relationships with your coworkers.

Like I said, I had forgotten about Watkin's post, but reflecting on it now, I see I've internalized it. In meetings, I prefer to stay quiet and to watch how others stake their claims. The manner in which they take positions is often as revealing as the position they're taking. Are they annoyed? Animated? Angry? Disinterested? Confused? Understanding the moods in the room gives me extra information for how to proceed with my proposals. If most people seem lost or unsure, I feel more comfortable presenting an idea confidently. It's an opportunity to provide structure and momentum when both are lacking. Yet, if someone else in the meeting is passionately arguing for something, I'm likely to provide my opinions softly. I'll share a differing perspective, but in this situation, I'd let it sit on the table and wait for someone else to pick it up. Otherwise, the passionate colleague can have their way.

A lot of this depends on having a trustworthy team. A team that shares goals at a higher level. If we all know we're working towards the same success metrics, it's easier to relax about individual decisions. I'm lucky to be on a team like that now. There's never any doubt we're all looking to make the best products we can.

If you're on a team that's constantly skidding out when disagreements arise, maybe see if The Sliding Scale of Giving A Fuck could help smooth things out.