I recently described what I do as “OXO is to kitchen utensils as I am to Websites.”  Oxo has awesome designs.  Check out their description of universal design.  I love their stuff.  They are fun to use and make me feel like the product cares about me as a human being.  Even if its just a carrot shredder.

On the web, this meas, BIG buttons.  It means no (or very little) instructions.  It means that everything is obvious.

Of course, this is hard when you don’t have time to develop the right design.  I do the best I can given the resources and deadlines.  As long as it is better than it was, I feel I did a good job.  Microsoft said something similar about their mission statement for Internet Explorer.  The speaker was Chris Wilson. (What’s the deal with the cat?)  He said the mission was “Leave the Web better than you found it”.

I feel that is my mission as well.  A bigger dream is to leave the World better than you found it. Maybe I am overshooting.

Speaking of “better than you found it”…  I helped improve Intuit.com last year.  It was good.  It had major improvements and statistical confidence in the improvements.  This was my version.  Now look at the current version.  What the heck did they do???  Now it’s got way too many tabs, and the major brands (turbotax, quicken, quickbooks) are all gone.  I heard they can’t even test anymore because the analytics software stopped working.  The site is not better than how they found it.  It’s worse.  Not OXO at all.

Hmm, it looks like http://www.oxo.com was not designed by OXO designers.  They missed a HUGE opportunity to convey the brand in their website.  Giant buttons, big black handles.  That’s a shame.

I find it fascinating how people react to responsibility and ideas.

Some people, like myself, find it easier to avoid responsibility.  Although, when I take on responsibility for something and achieve it, I feel a great sense of accomplishment.  But it isn’t “easy” for me.   I struggle to do the right thing.  My wife, on the other hand, finds it easier to take responsibility.  Dropping or avoiding something goes against her grain.  Many people feel she takes on too much.  I think this is because it is “easier” for her to take the initiative.  She finds it disturbing that others do not do the same.  I think she is in the minority on this one.  Which is easier for you?  Taking on responsibility or letting go of responsibility?

Ideas are a similar concept.  Building up an idea is a fragile and wonderful experience for me.  I absolutely get stoked on ideas.  They are the fire in my soul that keeps me chugging along.  I HATE destroying ideas.  I think of them as little smoldering threads of hay that need nurturing, less they die in the wind.  I really think I am in the minority on this one.  Most people find it easy to poke holes in an idea.  To say “this won’t work because…” or “To play devil’s advocate…” are the easier paths to take.  Its much easier to push down a set of blocks than to build them up.

I have become a little thick skinned when it comes to devil’s advocates. I know they mean well.  They just don’t understand how destructive they are to innovation.  Skepticism is critical and has it’s place.  But skepticism is a wet blanket on the kindling of an idea.  Maybe my thick skin isn’t so thick.  Ok, maybe it’s a medium skin.  Which do you find easier?  Coming up with an idea or playing devil’s advocate?

Introspection is an important life skill.  Be honest with yourself.  Sometimes, we don’t even realize we are taking the path of least personal resistance.

Brad Neuberg’s brainstorming technique yesterday was called The Sacred Cow.  You put on the white board all your assumptions about “sacred cows” of the browser.  These aren’t hard and fast rules, but rather they are things that people assume.  Of course, there are current innovative examples that break many of these.  Someone tooks pictures, so I don’t remember them all but these are some of the list:

• The box model
• Page based
• Hypertext
• Everything should be private
• The web is in a browser
• The user picks the browser
• New browsers shouldn’t break the web
• Pull Model (User starts the dialog)
• HTML/CSS/JS
• Desktop is not the Web
• The web is in a Sandbox
• The web is insecure

I am missing a bunch.  The key to this phase, according to Brad was to generate ideas.  No skepticism (YET) was allowed.  Just generating the ideas.  The he moved into Phase 2 which was, “Flipping”.  You took some of these and flipped them on their head.  What if the opposite were true?  What would the web look like?  Then finally, was skepticism, where you got practical and pragmatic and tried to ask, “What could be done, right now?”

One that really caught my attention was a shift in thought.  For a long time, there has been this concept of Desktop and Web.  The Web was “out there” and the desktop was “in here”.  My email client is on the web.  Katie’s is in Outlook on her desktop.  Some of my documents are in Google Documents, which live on the web and have no “files”.  They are data in a database which is rendered through JavaScript in a browser.

This led us to the idea of kicking out Desktop and Web and replacing it with Public and Private.  This obviously expands to mean all kinds of conditional trust relationships and publishing/privacy options.  Think about LinkedIn.  Who is allowed to see my contacts?  Friend of a friend?  But not 3 levels out.  Flickr has a similar concept with public and private pages.  Turbotax makes ooodles of money dealing strictly with metadata in a private way to you, but is actually sending that information to the IRS.

Now expand that outward.  I currently publish my online presence outward through Instant Messenger.  Even when I am typing, the recipient can see that.  Some may say this is trending towards a 1984 Orwellian society.  Although that is always a fear and it is important to avoid this possibility, I think there is tremendous benefit to a world where each person has control over what is shared and what isn’t. And also benefit in the inherent ability to share things voluntarily.

We are rapidly moving into a time where everything is sharable.  My IM typing, my Contacts, My Pictures, My Documents.  What is left for the desktop?  Maybe we don’t need a desktop at all?  Is this the Google vision?  The idea of a paradigm shift from Desktop/Web to Public/Private is fascinating to me.  I think we are already on that road.

I am reporting on a break-through idea.  I have to describe it.  It will change the world.  Ar at least change the World Wide Web.  It’s not “my” idea.  It was a result of a brainstorming session.  I’ll explain:

It’s the last day of Ajax Experience. It started off with a keynote by Kevin Lynch from Adobe.  It was an amazing demo.  He took a web application using Jack Slocum’s EXT and published it using Adobe AIR.  This allowed the application to run as a desktop app in any operating system.  It was HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but running without a browser.  It used WebKit, the browsing engine that powers Apple’s Safari.  So it basically had a specialized browser running inside Flash, on the desktop.  This is when I had a seed of an idea: “Hmm, I wonder if they could embed that in Firefox and IE?”

I didn’t pursue this line of thinking too much at the time.  Later, this evening, I was getting ready to leave when Brad Neuberg and Paul Abrams started a little brain storming session. Brad did an awesome job of moderating.  Seriously, he was a study in patience, tact and inspiration.  (Brad works on the core of Dojo)  We were imagining a different WWW.  A different paradigm of viewing the web, where “desktop” and “web” became blurred and “public” and “private” became important.  (More on that another time)

The most exciting idea, which several people seemed to be noodling on at the same time was what I am loosely calling Browser Possession.  It goes like this:

1. You make a web page using HTML, CSS and JS.
2. You test it in ONE browser.  Probably Webkit.
3. You include a single JS at the top of your page, a spinoff off of SWFObject.js
4.  The JS would instantiate a SWF file which would fill the 100% of the height and width of your browser window.
5. The JS would then suck in the HTML of the page, and feed it to the Flash Movie.
6. Then the Flash movie would instantiate Webkit inside it and render the page.

OR

1. Same as above, but instead of a Flash movie, it would be a Webkit native plugin.
2. This would need it’s own JS that was specific to this task.

What are the benefits?  First of all, I would only have to test ONE browser, regardless of whether you used IE, FF, or Safari.  Inside those browsers, would be the soul of Webkit, who is rendering the page, NOT the native rendering engine.  Webkit would have taken possession of the page rendering on demand of the publisher.  THEN, when a new version of Webkit is released, it is up to the publisher to change his page to use the new plugin ONLY if they wanted to.  Let’s say you had a page that you never wanted to upgrade.  You would specify Webkit 1.0 and never upgrade that to Webkit 2.0.  Maybe even allow for Gecko plugins or IE rendering plugins.  Then you could say, “I want this browser to render my page, regardless of what browser shell the user may be using!”  This also allows the page to be very simple so that Google can still read it and index it.

This would solve so many problems and create so many opportunities.

• It would reduce cross-browser testing to zero.
• It would allow much more advanced applications to be built because you wouldn’t have to yield to the lowest common denominator.
• It would simplify pages because you wouldn’t need all the extra divs that are only there because of box model problems.
• It would speed development because you wouldn’t need to learn all the different  browser language quirks.
• It would allow plugins with different languages like Python or Ruby on the client.
• It wouldn’t break the Web now, and it would ensure never to break the Web later.
• It would allow more radical upgrades of browsing engines because backward-compatibility would be a non-issue.

Apple could do this and convert a whole slew of people to be designing for Webkit (which powers Safari and the iPhone)

Side note:  Although Apple didn’t have a presence at AjaxExperience, I noticed an important thing.  9 out of 10 developers had Macs.  Very few PC’s.  I thought this was really interesting.  Plus, I saw at least 6 iPhones.  I used one. They are extremely nice to use. 

This idea is breakthrough.  I think almost everything we need to accomplish it is available today.  Whether a Flash plugin or a WebKit plugin, the infrastructure exists.  It would completely change how we build web applications and sites.  It would make IE and FF irrelevant.  They would become shells.  At that point the “browser” has alot less meaning.  It would ensure that pages would be rendered the way the developer wanted them to be rendered.  There are so many good things that would come of this.  We would be fast-forwarding the web by 10 years, right now.

This is the biggest idea, since jQuery.  And for me, that is saying alot.

Today is day 2 of AjaxExperience 2007.  It is the first conference I have attended since Usability Week 2006.  I have met lots of great people, like Bill Scott from Yahoo.  He worked on their design patterns site, which I think is something every good designer should read.  Also, Brian Cherne of HoverIntent fame.  I love that plugin.  Plus Jack Slocum, the tour-de-force of EXT.  Marketo uses EXT in a very substantial way and I think it has alot to do with the UI kudos we have been receiving.  Plus, of course, John Resig, founder of jQuery and Yehuda Katz who brought us VisualjQuery.com.

Lots of interesting things of note.  I don’t have internet access right now.  I am using on of their computers on a table.  I am standing without a chair, so basically, I will have to be brief.  Remember, I am a wimp.  That’s the worst thing, no wireless.  Need access!  Oh well, next time.

One thing of note is the excitement about EXT 2.0 from Jack.  He is pumped up about it.  I will have to check that out.  Hopefully, I will have the opportunity to use it one day at Marketo.  I can’t wait!  Also, I learned alot of interesting things about other libraries and the current state of Ajax Development.  I was pleasantly surprised how many design-centric talks there were.  One strange thing is the level of the talks often land in a wierd space.  It’s either too high level or too low level.  Some hit a good spot.  Ultimately, I feel an excitement in the air and I am glad I am here.  Definite thanks to the Ajaxian folks who accepted my presentation.

My talk went very well.  I think I should have coded an actual example live at the podium.  I will have to work that out.  I felt good though and got pretty good feedback.  Overall, there is one day left and I feel pretty psyched to be here.  Tonight is the jQuery meetup in SF.  I forgot my camera.  Nuts.  Maybe I will remember for tomorrow.

Logos are so tough.  Every group needs a logo to hang its hat on.  You need it for t-shirts and mugs and business cards and letter head.  There are hundreds of companies out there, as well as freelance designers who will make a logo pretty inexpensively.  However, only some logos get the status of “awesome”.  But is it the logo or the brand equity?  Is McDonalds a great logo or have we just been inundated with it for our whole lives.  It’s certainly better than the Burger King one.  How much did that contribute to the downfall of Burger King?

How do you create a great logo?  Is it simple or catchy?  How do you know a great logo when you see it?  Check out these logo collections.  Which ones really jump out at you?

1. http://www.salatti.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/101793494_aa72294a0b_o.jpg 
2. http://www.genextechno.com/shailesh/3d/Logo_samples.jpg
3. http://www.tmlfever.com/files/team_logos_2.gif
4. http://www.commadot.com/jquery/logos.png
5. http://www.net.vg/media7/images/best_logos_SM.jpg
6. http://www.illustrators.la/logo.htm 
7. http://www.custombusinesslogos.com/EPS_Logos/color_company_logos_on_cd.jpg
8. http://www.extraverage.net/img/co_logos.gif

There are so many more.  Just Google images search for Logos.  I see so many.  I wonder how many logos have been created in the last 10 years.

I used to hate wearing hats. They would feel uncomfortable. I never used one while playing tennis until this year. At some point, I bought a can of tennis balls that came with a nice looking hat from Wilson. I wasn’t wearing it, but while playing tennis I started to feel the top of my head tingle. Sort of like a sunburn in the making feeling. I realized, my hair has fallen out so badly, that I am in danger of getting a bald-spot sunburn. This depressed me greatly. I decided to give the hat a try.

Surprisingly, the hat felt comfortable. I knew my “bangs” no longer showed in the front of my head. Bangs are my memory of hair. Now I have scalp. Scalp sucks. I put on the hat and looked in the mirror. I saw my fathers scalp in front of my eyes. I was now, REALLY depressed. But it felt good to have the hat while playing tennis. I know I looked like a doofus, but it felt good. Until I cut my hair.

I cut my hair pretty short and when I put on the hat, I could feel the fabric with my head. My damn bald spot again! I could FEEL the hat with my head. I was really annoyed. I tried to ignore and eventually stopped feeling it, but still. I mean…come on! COME! ON!

I had the thickest hair! Look at this picture when I met Katie. It’s like a goddamn beaver crawled on my head! It’s thick and luxurious! Look at it! LOOK AT IT! Man. I have fallen apart. Look at this one. The fish has more hair than me. All that I ask is that I can survive long enough to transfer my soul into a nanobot body that can have as much hair as I want. Is that too much to ask?

I have had a fish tank for a few years now. I have progressively increased the size of the tank over the years, but it’s still not huge, as fish tanks go. Its 29 gallons. Still, that’s actually alot of water. It’s very heavy too. You need serious furniture underneath it and it’s a real pain to move.

I have a love-hate relationship with my aquarium. When it works, I love it. Its beautiful and serene. It’s quiet gurgling is soothing and the fish inside swim gracefully and sometimes chase each other around. When the plants grow, I feel a sense of pride. I had created this little world.

When it doesn’t work, I hate it. When some bacteria get in the tank and start a sickness or fungus grows or a new fish freaks out and dies. I can’t stand it. What did I do wrong? Did I not put in enough medicine? Did I forget to change the water?

For the first few years, I swear, I killed every fish we had through sheer stupidity. I couldn’t get it right. New fish would die right away. Then things settled down. Plants started to grow. Fish started to survive. I became happy with it. But the other day, when I woke up early, I cleaned the tank and added a little bit of algae remover. I thought it wouldn’t hurt and I hadn’t done this in a long time. Today the fish tank is cloudy and one fish, “Shugo” has already died. Shugo had been with me for over a year. I was so angry and sad. I killed Shugo. I feel so guilty. Why can’t I get this tank right?? Maybe I am not meant to have a tank.

When things go wrong in a tank, it sucks. The UX of fish tanks is very bi-polar. Either your up or your down. I suppose there are other activities like this. Gardening comes to mind. What else?

This post is dedicated to Shugo. I am sorry that I killed you Shugo. You were my favorite fish. I loved you.

I woke up early this morning.  I didn’t want to wake up early.  I have no idea why it happened, but once I am up, there is no going back.  So I did some chores.  I cleaned the fish tank.  I added one additive that I am hoping doesn’t kill all the fish.  It was a bad idea.  I cut my hair with Robocut, which was a good idea.  I cleaned up a little and had time to finish reading Huey Long, by T. Harry Williams.  I really enjoyed the book.  Huey was a special guy.  He had a photographic memory and a world-class sense of people and their motivations.  He always knew the right thing to say and the right thing to do.  Unlike Lyndon Johnson, his gift wasn’t “listening at you”, but rather, “talking to you”.  People were mesmerized by him.  Moreover, he was saying things that made common sense.

Huey proposed to share the wealth of the nation.  He said that too few hands had too much money.  It was his message and political skill that got FDR to do something about the imbalance of wealth in the country.  Today, we are in the same dilema.  The mega-wealthy (billionaires) have 95% of the wealth of the country.  We need more regular millionaires.  The middle class is what drives innovation and happiness, not the privileged few.  Huey understood that people yearned for a better world, and that the rich were stompig on the necks of regular citizens.  He had the vision and much more importantly, the political skill to accomplish these goals.

Huey was struck down in his prime by an assassin’s bullet.  At the time of his death, he was one of the most popular public figures in America and possibly threatened to be the downfall of FDR.  I wonder what would have happened if he had survived.  How would he have affected WWII?  When he died, his last words were, “Please God, don’t let me die.  I have so much to do.”

I love reading books about special people.  It makes me feel like special people can exist in this world.  I think of myself as a special person, but not like Huey.  Huey was something that I wish could happen more in this world.  Ben Franklin was like this.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone of this caliber in politics today?  Someone to rally behind.  Someone with vision.

What is this? It’s like a little cursor nose.

UPDATE: John Resig of Mozilla and jQuery fame has provided the answer. To Firefox this is a feature when you mix right-to-left or left-to-right text-directions. The little tick tells the user which direction the text should go. I can almost guarantee that no user gets that. 99.99% of users will think its a bug. Bad UX.

Here is an article discussing how it happens. And a sample confused user, with dozens of confused readers.