Everyone had left the room except for myself. I leaned over to her, told her I loved her, I knew she was dying and I would never see her again. I needed to have a honest, real, true moment with her. For us to share even a couple seconds where we acknowledged the finality of what the moment held and try to make sense of it. This would have been difficult and awkward. But it would have been worth it. Unfortunately, that moment never came. She said she’d be better tomorrow and that we’d talk soon.

We never spoke again. My best guess is that my Grandmother was trying to make me feel better by redirecting the conversation. She probably thought it would have been uncomfortable and unsettling, not to mention emotionally tough. Who knows. What I do know is that to this day I carry a deep regret that I was unable to have that exchange with her.

Meaningful human moments are born from pushing through challenges. Like most others, I all too often avoid these difficult moments. But for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I sought out that opportunity with my Grandmother. I look back at my life and the most meaningful, important moments had something to do with forcing myself through situations like these. At the end of that push is accomplishment, failure, realization, clarity. Big, weighty, impactful things.

The path of least resistance is not always the best for us. Our bodies and psyches thrive on the right amount of friction. In the drive to remove all friction from peoples’ lives, I question how much good we are ultimately doing. Rather, I think we need to be creating healthy friction for people – the right amount in the right ways at the right times.

I look back at taking photographs in 2001 with a Nikkormat FT2. No auto-focus, no auto aperture, and about as basic of a light meter as you’ll find. It was friction embodied. It also ended up being one of the most formative presences in my creative life. I appreciate what the point-and-shoot and the iPhone have done to expand the popularity of photography by lowering (or debatably removing) its learning curve. Still, I wonder how much joy is lost by taking a great shot without the hand holding.

To that end, I think we need to focus less on making people’s lives easier and more on making people’s lives fuller. People thrive on challenge and accomplishment. This doesn’t happen without friction. Instead of removing all friction, we need to isolate meaningful opportunities for growth and guide them through it. This is not as easy of a sell as “we’ll do it for you”. There needs to be a clear understanding of why the friction is worth it and what’s in it for them in the end. The difference between a challenge and a hassle is that a challenge has a perceived promise of growth whereas a hassle seems difficult for no reason.

Looking back at the last moments with my Grandmother, it would have been easier for me to simply tell her that I was looking forward to recovery and that everything would be back to normal soon. But it would have been an hollow ending to our 34 years together. As designers, we have the opportunity to smooth out the rough edges of life. We also have the opportunity to create a path through them. It can be difficult to discern which is appropriate, but getting it right can mean everything.

Metaphors make ephemeral concepts tangible. It’s a very natural way to communicate. This approach was core to the Star Operating System and has stayed so to this day. It was a huge success.

Metaphors vicariously describe a concept, but they don’t directly articulate. Therefore a metaphor’s efficacy relies on both subjects maintaining their relation. Once that relation breaks, metaphor becomes idiom. Raining cats and dogs is an example of a outdated metaphor that no longer makes sense. Idioms are a nightmare for people trying to learn a new language because they seem like nonsense to the outsider.

There’s also a relatively new problem with metaphors—they don’t last as long as they used to. The world is changing so quickly (especially in the digital world) that metaphors are losing their relevance sooner. Since metaphors rely on both subjects maintaining their relation, change is a metaphor’s greatest enemy.

My Gripe With the Save Icon

The save icon is essentially an idiom in the form of an icon. It once made sense and no longer holds any relevant meaning to people under 30. Idioms are a bad way to communicate if your goal is clarity and universality. The core purpose of an icon is clarity and universality. This is a problem. There are times when an idiom can be a fun, quirky way to get a point across, but it has no place for one of the core functions of computing.

Save designed by Cris Dobbins from The Noun Project

As soon as an icon becomes the visual equivalent of an idiom, its form has no decipherable meaning to those without context. Even worse, its form has no relevance to its the subject. In my opinion, this makes it objectively bad. The save icon is a great icon for floppy disk, not so much for save.

That’s my main gripe with using metaphors for icons, but there are other problems. For instance, once you use something else to describe a concept, there’s nothing stopping you from using that something else to describe another concept. Clear as mud? OK, let’s just jump to an example. We use the magnifying glass to communicate search.

Search designed by Egor Culcea from The Noun Project

But we also use it to communicate zoom in/out.

Zoom designed by Egor Culcea from The Noun Project

We use the magnifying glass to communicate two entirely different concepts. On their own, they work (although I always thought the magnifying glass for search was a stretch), but as a part of a system they break down. This is the equivalent of to, too and two in the English language.

That’s my problem with metaphors, they make a lot of sense in the short term and for a single solution, but in a broader, longer view, they begin to break down. My guess is that we will have more icons with problems similar to the save icon in the years to come.

Here’s the snag. Designing entirely symbolic visual representations for abstract concepts is really hard. For every success, there are a multitude of failures. Metaphors have less of a cognitive learning curve than abstract icons. I don’t think we should stop using them,but I think we need to be aware of their pitfalls and make the necessary adjustments.

Metaphors in our interfaces will need constant maintenance and updating. My main issue with the save icon is that we let it become an idiom. While I would still have philosophical issues with using a modern storage device to communicate save, at least it would be within the realm of decency.

I still prefer meaningful symbols to metaphors to communicate abstract concepts. The radiation trefoil is a great example of a meaningful symbol. If I am right and metaphors begin to suffer reduced longevity, it’ll make symbolizing concepts all the more important.

In short, a good metaphor is a useful way to communicate an idea at a specific point in time. Not so great for a prolonged amount of time.

I am particularly happy to get 0.9.2 out because it finally frees us up to start working on 0.9.3 which is going to be a lot of fun. The theme for 0.9.3 is automation. We will be using Grunt to make theme setup, development and deployment more streamlined. We’ve already been picking away at it, but we’ll finally be able to dig into it with our entire focus.

Here’s the full list of changes for 0.9.2:

• Broke up the repository into two separate repos.
• Cleaned up the repo dramatically
• Added option to remove version URL parameter to enqueued scripts
• Added option to remove version URL parameter to enqueued styles
• Added option to remove WordPress version meta tag
• Converted main content div to the ‘main’ tag
• Fixed 404 template
• Added individual IDs for comments
• Made comments count in sidebar a link
• Fixed font size for unordered list within 3-up view
• Fixed pagination margins
• Fixed list line-height in content section UI
• Improved structure and organization of SCSS/CSS
• Increased optimization of SCSS/CSS
• Broke up global.scss into smaller modules
• Text input placeholder replacements for IE
• Made the removal of script/style version URL parameter optional
• Moved core Javascript into parent theme (not included by default)
• Added simple image deferring Javascript (not included by default)
• Added French translation
• Added Polish translation

San Francisco is an example of where society is outpacing its habitat. While San Francisco and other urban dwellings are experiencing this phenomenon now, it’s only a matter of time until every town and suburb goes through the same phenomenon. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how we got here. Making any significant infrastructural modification takes considerable time, money and will. The amount of disruption of daily life for its residents would be considerable. On the occasions where projects like these fail, it becomes harder for future projects.

While this may be quaint, it’s absolutely stupid. Photo by Michael Patterson

Civil engineering is nothing like software engineering, but both professions face similar challenges. As the things they make age and complexity gets layered on, it becomes hard to make even the smallest changes. Any foundational modifications often lead to instability. It gets to the point where the team just wants to keep things running as-is because anything else would be risky and expensive. The great thing about software is its intangible existence. Old code can be scrapped and re-written at a relatively low cost. In comparison, if the city of New York wanted to retrofit Brooklyn, they couldn’t start by leveling it. That difference is one of the key ingredients of how the world of software has kept up (and even accelerated) the rate of advancement while many sectors that have a physical component to them are just trying to keep up.

Our cities are embarrassingly behind in the most basic technologies. There is only so much commercial products and services can do. This gap is only going to expand at an accelerating rate. At some point cities will begin to hold back its population. This is a serious problem.

So how can we solve this? I would like to see a start-from-scratch approach by building a prototype city built entirely on new technologies and new approaches in urban design. Each city would be relatively small in area and population—let’s say 4 square miles in area. Each prototype city would work to solve weighty urban issues in different ways based on the needs of their region. For instance, you probably wouldn’t want to create a solar-powered city in Seattle.

What’s the modern equivalent to the stereotypical 1950′s “City of Tomorrow”?

These prototype cities would provide an unconstrained vision of how cities could function. This would provide a much clearer view of how certain new technologies/approaches impact a community (for better or worse). They would also provide an avenue for technology companies to envision ambitious ideas with considerably less friction. Most importantly, these prototype cities would provide a blueprint for existing cities on how to (or how not to) approach modernizing their infrastructure to reduce the amount of risk when they choose to do so.

One focus for a prototype city could be the emerging technology of autonomous vehicles. At this point, the autonomous vehicle has had to work around laws and infrastructure that never planned to support them. Imagine how much better autonomous vehicles could operate with roads designed specifically for them. Would road signs have machine-readable information printed on them? Would they have different speed limits? Their own partitioned roads? How would a society work differently in this scenario? We can all take guesses on how autonomous vehicles would impact urban life or we can actually have it play out and apply those learnings to modernizing the rest of our cities.

What would a city look like if these were the only cars on the road? Photo by Scott Schrantz.

The autonomous vehicle is a perfect example of a technology that is almost assuredly going to become mainstream, have a dramatic impact on our society and require a significant adjustment on the city, state and national levels of government. I can guarantee you that the transition will be challenging, no matter what we do. If we just try to wing it and institute national standards without a model to work from, it’s going to be a mess. I can think of countless other technologies that will have a similar impact. We need to employ a [test, measure, adjust] approach to problems this large and complex. As long as cities are taking a reactionary approach to technology, any modernization efforts will be hacks.

We could also use this approach during recovery efforts of cities hit by disasters. Think hurricane Katrina or Sandy. We could use those disasters as opportunities to rebuild our towns/cities with forward-looking approaches and technologies. Think of a recovery process where as many technologists show up as engineers. Cities/towns hit by a disaster could have the opportunity to not just rebuild but re-imagine.

In many ways, America feels old, timid and tired. The country that created the Interstate system and the Apollo program has lost either the confidence, the will or both to create new, ambitious public infrastructures. The result is a portfolio of old and outdated cities. It is necessary for our existing cities to improve their infrastructure, but the process is far too incremental and compromised to provide a guiding direction of where America’s cities should head. Government shouldn’t be the only source of innovation, but it can’t shy away from it either. The private sector can’t and shouldn’t modernize our cities. We need government-generated innovation; a NASA for civil engineering if you will. Without such an initiative, our public spaces will always be uninspiringly behind.

What We Come Back To

I often look back at the things that stay present in my mind through the years. The things that I keep coming back to. Most of the things on that list I would not immediately be described as simple. They may be simple to use/learn/consume, but that’s not why I keep coming back to them. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The things I keep coming back to have immense depth—they encourage a long-term relationship because there is so much to it.

I have a deep love for the game of baseball. I started playing as a child. I went to my college specifically to play baseball. The game is now one of the most cherished experiences my wife and I share together. I stopped following the game for a stretch of 5 years, but I came back to it. I have listened to countless games and have played innumerable innings and I never grown tired of it. I feel like there’s still so much to learn and experience.

Baseball has had a formative and permanent impact on my life. Not because it was simple or easy to pick up, but because of the nuance and details—enough to devote a lifetime to fully learn. It’s those kinds of experiences that create life-long love affairs. Simple is an admirable quality, but alone it provides transient convenience. Profound is timeless, remembered. Profound shapes people’s lives.

Profundus

The word profound stems from the Latin word profundus, which has a broader meaning than its descendent. I found this definition in particular interesting:

1. deep, profound
2. intense, extreme, profound; immoderate
3. boundless, vast; bottomless
4. thick, dense
5. obscure, unknown, mysterious

What I love about this definition is that it paints a more accurate, well-rounded picture of something with depth. The profound is often dense, obscure and complex—it’s in its nature. It’s that density and complexity which makes something with depth less accessible. The end result is often something not immediately approachable and often has a considerable learning curve. This is normally seen as an impediment, but it also presents a compelling opportunity. A steep learning curve, balanced by the promise of a meaningful return can lead to long-term personal investment and result in a real sense of accomplishment. These are experiences we remember.

Profound is Timeless

Designing a profound experience is by no means trivial—we’d all be lucky to do it once in our life. our meaningful experiences are deeply personal and highly subjective. Focusing on convenience is considerably easier and less risky. However, their shallow focus makes them less crucial to our lives. If you design something that’s easy, most will like it—until the next thing comes along. If you design something that’s meaningful, some will love it—and remember it. The things that last are profound.

I noticed an interesting pattern, through almost all those individual arguments. Very few, if any described the current Save icon as being good. There were plenty of mentions of it being established, understood, standard, etc. But rarely, if ever, referred to as good. The sense I was getting was, “Yeah, it’s old and kind of silly, but it works. If it’s not broken, why fix it? Imperfect as it may be, we’re stuck with it”.

First and foremost, the Save icon is broken. Objectively broken. I won’t go into the details of that in this article; I’ll be writing more about that in the near future. Initially, my interest in redesigning the Save icon was purely due to the fact that the design is not clearly communicating the concept of “save” and that it can be made better. However, after reading through the meta-discussion, I think it’s important to redesign the icon just to dispel the idea that we are somehow stuck with the current icon or with anything for that matter. Nothing is forcing us to continue to use an antiquated design and we shouldn’t feel beholden to some tenured relic that’s only redeeming quality is it just happened to be around before anything else. We’re not talking about legislation or physical infrastructure. We’re talking about the most fluid, dynamic medium around – information. If we can’t redesign a stupid icon, how can we expect to change serious things.

The aforementioned arguments for keeping the old floppy disk around aren’t new. It’s the same basic argument that has kept the imperial unit system around in America. Replacing an established standard isn’t easy. People won’t like it—mainly because it has the unfortunate quality of being different. That dreaded learning curve of “different” often scares people towards safer paths. Yes, new things need to be learned. But learning is a basic function of the human experience. The goal should be to make something worth learning. By avoiding tackling old, outdated and flawed standards, we are missing out on meaningful design challenges.

I am convinced we can make a better Save icon. It’ll be hard, but I truly think a symbol can be made which more accurately, elegantly and timelessly communicates the concept. I’m also convinced we can make a lot of other things better—really important things. However, many of those things have established norms that aren’t going to be particularly easy to replace. That’s the risk. If we succeed, the reward is the chance to make profound impacts.

The age or establishment of something shouldn’t preclude it from scrutiny and/or replacement. If anything, that should make us all the more eager to pull it down from its pedestal. Our job is to make things better—or at least try to do so. The Save icon is not good enough. We should try to make it better.

Speaking of breaking the bank, this leads directly to the Leica M9. The Leica rangefinder is nearly a perfect fit for my photography preferences. Leica’s M mount collection consists entirely of manual, prime lenses. Many of these lenses are amazingly small and produce some of the best quality possible (in the right hands). In short, Leica image quality is legendary. The problem is that these cameras are notoriously expensive. A new M9 goes for roughly $7,000 and their lenses range between $1,300 and $10,000. I have wanted to shoot with a Leica for nearly a decade. I decided that if I couldn’t buy one, I could rent one for a week. Since the rental service didn’t offer the 50mm Summicron lens I was interested in, I got the 50mm Summarit.

So why am I writing about a 4 year old camera when there are countless articles written by far more experienced/credible people taking photos? Well, from everything I can tell, the people reading this blog are not professional photographers and may not have even heard of Leica prior to this post. I felt it would be a way to expose a group of people into a completely unique photographic device, and why it’s an amazing camera.

It turned out renting the M9 was a very bad decision because after using it for a week, it has been painful to go back. The camera met my expectations in image quality (even with their “worst” lens) and far exceeded my expectations with everything else. If you know anything about Leica, you simply expect a properly captured photo to look amazing, but it’s hard to quantify the “small things” about using a Leica until you actually use it.

My Impressions

Image Quality

I went out with the M9 and my D700 on the first day to compare results. I intentionally did not compare the photos pixel for pixel; I just wanted a high-level comparison. I didn’t see drastically sharper images from the M9/Summarit than I got from my D700/Nikkor f1.4. The Summarit may have been sharper, but the Nikkor f1.4 was sharp enough. The big difference was the natural contrast and tones that the Summarit delivered. The colors and contrast already felt right.

Many times, I would import the M9 photos into Lightroom and the images wouldn’t need any adjustments. As someone who constantly is fiddling with the RAW files from my D700, this blew me away. It’s hard for me to explain how the M9 photos felt right, they just did. Additionally, the contrast delivered straight from the lens was not something I was able to replicate in my D700 photos by simply increasing the contrast once in Lightroom.

One important note is that the M9′s sensor delivers notoriously poor image quality at high ISO. I think I shot one photo at ISO 1600 just to see for myself. The Leica delivered as promised. This was one area where my D700 blew it away hands down.

Focusing & Framing

Setting up a shot with a rangefinder is quite different than with the SLR. I don’t want to go into the gory details of the differences between SLR and rangefinder viewfinders because that could take a whole article. The gist is that a rangefinder’s viewfinder’s view is independent of the lens on the camera. This video concisely describes the M9′s viewfinder:

I loved the ability to see what was outside of the shot because it gave me greater awareness of my surroundings. After going back to shooting with my SLR, I felt like I had tunnel vision. The rangefinder framing process felt more flexible – I could keep the camera up to my eye and still have a general understanding of what was going on around me.

Focusing took 15 minutes to feel natural and so much better than my D700. It’s important to note that the D700 is not designed for manual photography. In many regards, I was very happy that Nikon provided any manual focus options to begin with. However, you can quickly tell that the feature is not a top priority. I could go on for paragraphs as to how the manual focus mechanism on the D700 is sub-optimal, but this article is about the M9. Suffice to say that a camera designed for manual focus will be better at manual focus.

Ergonomics

The body of the M9 feels more solid than the D700 (a difficult feat) and it considerably smaller and lighter (roughly 2/3 the weight of the D700). The M9 doesn’t have any rubberized areas and it can feel quite slick. This intermittently scared the hell out of me since there were times when I felt I could drop it. The body doesn’t have a built in handgrip, which I’m OK with, but I’d never carry the camera without a strap around my shoulder. The M9 camera body may not be ergonomic in shape, but due to its smaller shape and lighter weight, it still feels great in the hand.

Shooting Feel

What grabbed me the most about the Leica is the quality with the highest subjectivity. The overall feel of the Leica, specifically its size/weight and incredibly quiet shutter, made it the most enjoyable camera I’ve ever shot with. The camera and its lenses are so small that I found unsuspecting subjects were not intimidated when I pointed it at them. I could frequently get away with people not even knowing that I took a photo of them because it was so silent.

The poor-quality preview screen had the interesting side effect of stopping me from chimping every time I took a photo. I spent less time worrying about the photos I had already taken and worrying more about capturing the next shot. This feeling was magnified by the fact that I knew the camera would deliver a great photo if I held my end of the bargain (nailing the focus, not pointing the camera directly at the sun, etc.). It was a wonderful feeling to know that I was the bottleneck for every shot I took.

Rent One. Seriously.

I ended up loving the M9 for the way it let me take photos as much as the photos it produced. On the surface, the camera is tremendously overpriced, but it provides an entirely unique shooting experience. In a way, you are paying for what the camera allows you to experience rather than what it can do for you.

The site saw a pretty large spike of traffic (we’re not talking Reddit or Hacker News scale, but still significant). The results exceeded my expectations.

App.net is betting that a paid model and a promise to its customers will ensure that it will stay financially viable and customer/developer friendly. I have my doubts. I do not think enough people are willing to pay for a status update service, making the long-term interest in third-party development for the platform questionable. My other concern is that promises, no matter how genuine in intent, mean nothing. App.net could get acquired (no longer making it their choice to make), they may need to adjust their business model, or shift their product focus entirely. Each of these scenarios could force App.net to change their policy. App.net’s first priority is to keep the lights on. That would likely supersede any promise made to its customers.

These issues are not exclusive to App.net. They exist for any company in this business. It’s for these reasons I believe any proprietary, centralized service for status updates is ultimately flawed. The walled garden approach is beneficial for incubating emerging technologies, but once those technologies mature, the closed environment stifles progress. Look at the cable industry. Look at the wireless industry. The status update has reached the level of utilization that demands a decentralized, open standard as its foundation. Services like Twitter and App.net can still be valuable acting as the icing on the cake. When Dalton Caldwell shared his idea for App.net he used Github as a shining example of how a service should operate. I agree. The difference so far between App.net and Github is that Github is a service which enhances an open/standard technology and App.net is not.

The good news is that there are emerging standards for sending and receiving status updates. OStatus seems to be the most widely adopted with RStatus, Identi.ca and Status.net all supporting it. Due to the services’ OStatus support, each network can communicate, follow and interact with each other. Can you imagine if you had to sign up for Gmail to get emails from other Gmail users? Would email have become the pervasive communication medium if it wasn’t based on a standard/open protocol? Of course not. It shocks me that we are still dependent on one or two primary services to broadcast status updates to an audience. I would like to see App.net support an emerging standard for status updates (such as OStatus) and then build a premium service on top of it. I would gladly pay $100/year for that, especially if I could guarantee (beyond a promise) that my content and connections would never be walled in. Considering App.net’s momentum, they could provide a significant podium to promote the support of a standard.

Twitter helped pioneer status updates and microblogging. They were so successful that the idea has outgrown the company. The communication medium is so big, that no single company or collection of companies can do it service. App.net can be a valuable piece of the puzzle, but to expect it to be the alternative to Twitter is setting them up for failure and setting us up for disappointment. This issue is begging for a standardized solution—one I hope App.net helps push forward.

The written word on the internet disposable. When objects become disposable, creators are less inclined to concern themselves with quality. My guess is the rise in short-form blogging (ala kottke.org, PSFK, etc.) is due to this disposable culture. I enjoy both blogs, but they do not satisfy the itch for in-depth content. Writing on the web is increasingly focused on quantity rather than quality.

When was the last time you went back and updated a blog post from a few months ago? I’m assuming rarely; likely never. I have plenty of blog posts where the subject matter is still very relevant, but I am never gone back to make them better. In contrast, when was the last time you updated a code library to fix a bug or add a new feature? Monthly? Weekly? Daily? We have long-term relationships with code. We fix it, improve upon it. We work on it with our peers. Due to that reality, we feel much more comfortable sharing something basic with the intention to iterate—often with community feedback and support. I love writing code for this very reason.

I love sharing ideas, but I hate writing. Mainly because it feels so different from coding. When I write for my blog, it is normally a solitary process where I try my damnedest to dot every i and cross every t. I publish and then I move on. I have tried to create more collaborative processes, but the tools are just not there yet.

Ideas are not cheap, but we certainly treat them cheaply. A modern platform is needed for to enable writing in the same iterative, collaborative process we have for design and development. I know I am not alone in this opinion. Two years ago, I wrote about this subject and mentioned how writing tools should feel more like source control. A year and a half later, a writer for Wired wrote an article with Github.

If we want writers to put more time into their content, the process needs to change dramatically. First, the all-or-nothing approach to posting needs to change. I would love an article to start off as a public draft where I get initial feedback and measure the general interest in the subject. From there, the article can grow, shift and evolve as necessary. Secondly, our articles need to have a much longer half-life. If I make a serious improvement or update to a past blog post, I want to feel confident that people will actually read it. I am tired of forcing myself to finish a blog post that you nor I will never make better and you will never read again. Our ideas should not be disposable and the right tools could go a long way to fix this problem.

In only a few years, we have seen iconography move from flat, meaningless images to embedding the icons in fonts to assigning icons to appropriate values in a font and now they are replacing entire words. These steps are showing a progression of web iconography icons becoming an extension (and at times a replacement) of traditional language. I don’t see this trend declining anytime soon and here’s why.

Our screens are getting smaller, our resolutions are getting denser and our audience becoming more diverse. Iconography represents an space-efficient and universal communication method. An icon may not be worth a thousand words, but it can often be worth 3 or 4. With limited screen real-estate, that is definitely worth it. With the inevitable step of Retina displays on all of our devices, vector imagery begins to have a significant advantage to their raster counterparts. This will just accelerate the move to font-based or SVG-based web iconography.

I love what Oak has done with Symbolset. It makes the web more visual for people and more semantic for computers. It was the next logical step of web iconography that I never even considered.

The internet depends on free, public and open source resources. I have mentioned this before, but I think it is crucial to remember. I do not think Iconic is the best icon set on the block, but I know that it has been beneficial to many developers and designers. I also think it is time to move on from both these icon sets and create something entirely new.

So, without further ado, check out Iconic and Cue on The Noun Project.

The irony of MMOs is while they have garnered the reputation of being useless time-sinks, the in-game mechanics are almost always built around continual self-improvement. The problem is that the self improvement is focused entirely on your in-game character. It is understandable how this is appealing to many people. Their character is not impeded by the drudgery of daily life and with enough effort they are able to be an important piece of a large community. In many MMOs, their character can even shape the very fabric of the virtual world itself. That is compelling. To achieve these goals, players are willing to grind countless hours. People put in serious work for their character and/or their guild. The problem is that work exists solely within the confines of that game. Many critics of games say players are too invested in their games. I think there needs to be even greater investment.

If you can figure out EVE, you can figure out Algebra.

From my view, the problem with games like MMOs is there still a clear line between reality and game. This model is fertile grounds for creating an escape mechanism. So while your real life is falling apart, your in-game life is doing just fine. Interesting opportunities arise by more closely coupling the in-game character with the player. Positive actions made in real life have positive impacts for your character and poor choices in real life have in-game consequences. All of the sudden, the achievement hunter mindset doesn’t turn off once you log off. The “game” is always being played.

How This Could Work

The questing system in MMOs has worked for quite some time. The basic mechanics are as follows: Give the player a small, clear, challenging, yet achievable task. Upon completion of that task, reward the player with experience points and/or items. This mechanic can translate well to real-world jobs to complete. These could be as simple as getting good marks on a test or photographing and geotagging graffiti in their hometown. As the player completes these quests, they gain in-game experience, powerful items and trust points. Trust points allow the player to take on quests that may be more complex or rely more on trust that the player is actually completing them. Obviously, if the player is caught gaming the system, their trust is dropped significantly. If they are caught too many times, they can be banned permanently. If a player accumulates enough trust points, they can help shape quests/activities in their local community and in the game.

Quest complete.

By keeping grades up, going to gym regularly or completing helpful tasks in their local community, they would get access to items that are otherwise impossible to obtain.

Example Scenarios

Jack is a 13 year old boy and a WoW player. He’s quite smart, but lacks attention to his schooling. Recently, as his game play has increased, his grades and classroom participation have begun to decline. Instead of taking the game away from Jack, his parents sign him up to bind his grades to in-game achievement. Jack’s teacher submits monthly grade reports to WoW quest managers. If his marks are high, Jack gets achievement points. Those points can be traded in for experience points and/or special in-game items.

Jack's B+ earned him Doomhammer.

Steve is a high school student who battles obesity. He recently got hooked on Star Wars: The Old Republic and is spending 30+ hours a week playing the game. He wants to level faster, but there literally is no more time in the week to make that happen. However, he sees that the game has an agreement with a local gym that is you log 5 hours a week at the gym and show progress, you can get huge amounts of in-game experience points or items. Steve is not interested initially in exercise, but he is interested in leveling his character. When Steve checks in to the gym, his account is credited with experience. Steve loses 20 pounds and gains 5 character levels.

Emma is a 24 year old who is a year out of college and lacking some direction. She did moderately well in school, but never found her calling. During college, she spends a disproportionate amount of time playing EVE with her guild (or in EVE, corporation). She continues to make EVE and her corporation a central part of her life. She is one of the corporation leaders who manages hundreds of members through activities and events. Emma discovers that she can use the organizational skills used in-game at the local food bank. By volunteering weekly, she gets extra ISK (EVE currency) to support her in-game activities.

Emma leads thousand-ship fleets. She can handle a 5 person volunteer team.

In our current view of the world, Emma’s skill at running a successful corporation is not something she could put on a resume. All the social collateral gained remains trapped in New Eden. Meanwhile, we have begun to understand the value of someone with 100,000 Twitter followers. Why the disconnect?

This theme is interesting for a couple reasons. The first is that it fast. I wanted to design a theme that was spartan, focused on the reading experience and loaded virtually instantaneously. There is room for improvement, but the theme works to keep queries and requests to a minimum. It was this emphasis on speed which prompted me to shorten the theme’s name of Franklin Street to Frank. The second interesting idea for this theme is the home page’s customization features. The theme gives users 8 different templates to choose from (1-up, 2-up, 3-up, 4-up, right aside, etc.). Each template can be stacked on another, in any order or number of your choosing. Additionally, most templates allow you to choose the number of posts to display and filter by category. I have yet to see this approach in any WordPress theme and I believe it to be quite useful.

There still is a way to go before I am completely happy with this theme. My goal is to get the theme submitted to WordPress’ theme collection in the next couple weeks (all while ensuring that the theme stays lean and mean). The theme admin screens need some love, there is documentation to write and the CSS could sure use another optimization pass. There are also some small improvements/fixes I’d like to make to my own site—and from now on, any changes to my site will be committed to the Github project.

I have to give a big thank you to Jon Christopher for providing some invaluable help in this process. Jon was a huge help in making the home template options work—I honestly could not have done it without him. I want to encourage you to use this theme if you find it useful and contribute to making it better. I have put in countless hours releasing everything related to this site. If you have found any of it useful through the years and wish to give something back, I would urge you to fork Frank and make it better.

There are still small issues that need to be addressed, but this was the big one. The next goal is to get a project page up along with some simple starting guides, take a breath and see where the project goes from there. My current site is still imperfect, but I consider it to be a good reflection of how I view responsive web design. As I mentioned in an recently, responsive web design goes beyond a responsive layout. Our designs need to address limited bandwidth and processing power associated with mobile devices.

My hope is this theme will continue to improve so that it can provide a viable option for bloggers who provide a fast, reading-centric experience for their visitors. Due to my limited schedule however, I need to rely on the community to help me push this project forward. If you have enjoyed this site and/or you would like to use this theme, I encourage you to do so. I also encourage you to help make it better for everyone else. So please, fork this theme and get in touch with me if you are interesting in contributing.

Tips to Shape Your Thinking

1. Consider time as a core dimension of user experience

Speed has traditionally been considered a problem for engineering and all but ignored by most designers. However in many cases, design can make or break the performance of a site before a single line of code has been written. For that reason, the temporal experience (e.g., page load speeds, app performance or anything else that impedes the fluidity of an experience) of a product needs to be considered foundational to the practice of interaction design. This means that if a site loads/performs slowly based on its design, the design was unsuccessful.

2. Understand how design can impact speed

Grasping the basics of design’s impact on speed is simple, but digging into the nitty-gritty is quite difficult. The basics are obvious: large files and many requests will take more time to download. Anything delivered to the user takes time. The challenge is uncovering the less obvious, such as avoiding expensive database queries or CPU-intensive tasks (on both the server and client side). The main takeaway is that anything added has an impact. The goal is to take a preventative approach towards the basics and to work closely with your fellow developers to avoid the less obvious.

3. Determine where speed resides in the hierarchy of experiences you’re designing

Every experience designed has a hierarchy of needs that must be met. Those needs may shift in order based on the product’s focus on the people you are designing for. The design process is often an exercise of balancing all those needs appropriately. While speed may not always be at the top of the list in needs, it always fits into the equation. Understanding the importance of speed in the experience will help you make informed compromises and stands.

4. Make every element justify its existence

Designers already know that every pixel on the screen needs to be accounted for, every interaction justified. That same approach should be taken towards speed. Each request, byte and query added should be intentional and markedly improving the experience. If not, it should be gone.

"What would you say you do here?"

5. Treat bytes like pixels

It’s great to see an increased attention to craft, simplicity and a pixel-by-pixel focus to interface design. That same tenacity towards perfection of aesthetic and reduction needs to be directed towards performance. This means hand-optimizing your images, cleaning your HTML, CSS and Javascript. Make your sites pixel-perfect and byte-perfect.

The points laid out are not too far removed from what is typically prescribed for effective design. The difference is that normally designers talk about stripping away elements and features for the purpose of simplicity in interaction. Those same practices of refinement and reduction can yield equally worthwhile results in creating more fluid web experiences.

Writing on the iPad has inherent challenges. In portrait mode, the keyboard is far too cramped to perform any significant typing. It is clear that landscape was the intended mode of typing due to the more realistic dimensions of the keyboard in addition to the iPad cover’s feature to place the device at a suitable typing angle. However, landscape mode has the problem of vertical space limitations with the keyboard active. With these challenges, I am always interested to see how app designers try to provide more functionality with such significant restrictions. A recent app that has gotten some attention is Writing Kit, which provides advanced writing features as well as in-app researching tools. Unfortunately, it has also followed a design cue I first observed on iA Writer for iPad. Writing Kit adds a formatting bar on top of the iOS keyboard, offering useful features at the cost of exaggerating the problem of writing space. One has to ask themselves how worthy an interface element is if it erodes the experience around the subject it is supporting.

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of Writing Kit’s interface. Below is a screenshot of the app in landscape mode with a breakdown of writing space and content space.

The app’s content area accounts for only 36.6% of the screen. Due to this small amount of space, only 10 lines of text can be displayed. iA Writer’s typographic choices hinder that further by displaying only 5 lines of text in the default mode and 6 lines of text in focused mode. This effectively places “blinders” on the writer—where they can no longer have a broad view of what they have written. Some may prefer this side-effect, but myself and others undoubtedly do not.

When the elements that are not directly necessary for the function of writing are removed, the ratio of content to interface begins to even out.

If all regions colored red are replaced by additional content area, the content takes up 51.5% of the screen, providing significantly more visible content space. The features provided in the top bar and keyboard are good features, but they detract from the app’s core purpose. With such a space-restricted medium, there need to be new approaches to accessing functionality without persistently taking up significant space.

One approach is to rely more heavily on gestures. Daedalus Touch allows you to move the cursor space-by-space by tapping on the left and right edges of the content area. However, we run into the age-old discoverability issues when relying too heavily on gestures. Therefore I am skeptical of their long-term efficacy. I think that new interface patterns are needed to address these sorts of issues. I do not come bearing solutions yet, but I think it’s something we all need to be working on.

Keeping content as the focus has traditionally been less of an issue with the large screens found in desktops/laptops. Now that phones and tablets are becoming established and app makers are working to inject more functionality into apps, there is a risk of drowning content in interface. We have a lot of work ahead of us to avoid just that.