New methods for managing people making Web sites are big these days, with the most popular being Agile. Basically it boils down to making a small team of builders completely responsible for a project, and enforcing constant communication as people work on it in well-defined chunks. There are many engineer/programmer proponents for this, but few designers seem to have adopted the approach (though there some, but others are skeptical or downright hostile to it).

The difference is another example of Aristotle vs. Plato, the scientific, evolutionary approach vs. the aspirational large vision. Design wants to create a beautiful vision up-front for what a new world would be, but divorced from the deeper and more meaningful design that engineers do.

Without going into the problems and tensions that have been common in these projects, I think it's safe to say that no one has developed a great 'best practice' for how it can actually work (and I've worked within dozens of Agile teams and read quite a bit about it, so anyone who claims to have it solved I can say is probably pulling your leg). So what could work better, at least?

Just Start

Often there is the assumption that designers need time to develop separate deliverables and have their ideas specified out before they can talk to builders. This is a breeding-ground for mistrust, and more importantly the designers shouldn't be working without an intimate knowledge of the technical design--what information is gathered, how it moves around, and what's done to it. Designers should get into the project at the very start, talk through the project in detail with the whole team, and make decisions with the team. They should be making sketches or prototypes the first day.

Visual and Interaction Design Comes Last

Many sprints I've worked on have tried to have design done a sprint ahead of implementation, or a week, etc. This is sadistic. When engineers are iterating and improving as they go but designers get one shot at it before they've seen any working code, everyone is set up to fail. Rough interaction design and pages should be done collaboratively with engineers as they work, and detailed interaction design and visual design should come last, as a refinement of that.

Actual Alignment

Much of the attempts at collaboration between designers and engineers in Agile projects have put the designer in a rough spot, between the product owner and their team. The designer makes mocks/comps/boards to should how the thing could look, and the product person signs off on that before the sprint starts. The documents for what will be built, however (e.g. the stories, acceptance criteria, etc.), doesn't include the designs. Inevitably, the team makes changes to the designs as they implement, and the designer is either out of the loop (working on a different part, or not part of the team), or has to redesign on the fly in mid-sprint. Designers and engineers should put aside time for 'alignment' tasks, where they discuss and agree on what they will build, either as part of the pre-sprint tasks or the sprint itself. This is similar to 'engineering-only' sprints, which focus on the 'plumbing' of a project and not what users see.

The alternative to having these kinds of deep integration of designers into Agile teams, I believe, is mediocre work, or a lot of additional work to fix the inevitable breakdowns that happen when talented people work together. This is actually much more simple human nature stuff that's been going on in offices everywhere, for a long time, probably since cave-people first called a meeting.

I discovered project "Vulcan" at Purdue University, which is mapping carbon emissions on a detailed level in the US; very cool. I wondered whether there is a difference in emissions between parts of the country that lean Democrat or Republican. Fortunately the wonderful Vulcan project people made it very easy to find out by publishing their data (I used the simplified data set showing emissions per capita change over about 8 months, and binned the counties by predominant House district). I did a fast and sloppy job, so this map is just approximate. To me it shows that there is a pronounced difference between the parties in likelihood to emit carbon, but (as the Vulcan project found) geography is a larger factor.

Palin posted her beliefs about the health care bill. The only one that's available is the House bill HR 3200, so that's what she must be referring to. Below is her text's assertions (minus the characterizations and other material that doesn't deal with facts) and the facts as best I can glean them from reading the bill.

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care...

So far none of the proposals in Congress have been shown to offer any cost savings, the only assertions that have been made have been that the existing Medicare programs have reduced costs, which seems to be true (a 2008 Government Accountability Office study shows privately run Medicare Advantage plans have 16.7% admin. costs, while Medicare B has 6.6%; there are disagreements about the terms of the study, but no argument about its conclusion).

...but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.

This seems to refer to this National Review article where Sowell says that "The government does not have some magic wand that can 'bring down the cost of health care'; it can buy a smaller quantity or lower quality of medical care, as other countries with government-run medical care do." This assertion may or may not be true, but is not supported with any facts by Palin or Sowell. The bill itself again does not attempt to lower health care costs, so it's impossible to conclude that what Sowell says would be its effect.

And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.

Decisions about how health care is approved for payment or not is not provided for or mentioned in the bill. The existing Medicare payment decision process is referred to, but that would not be changed by the bill.

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care.

Through researching other blogs and sites, it seems that this is referring to section 1233, "ADVANCE CARE PLANNING CONSULTATION" (it starts on page 425 of the bill). This section sets standards for providing information on what options people have to create legal instruments concerning life and death concerns in their health care, specifically a "living wiil," health care proxy, and other advance directives for individuals to express their decisions about their care if they are unable to themselves. The section establishes a panel of health care 'practitioners' to create a set of national standards for how information about these options is communicated.

The section only mentions providing anyone eligible for Social Security information on these legal instruments, and the panel mentioned has no power to make any decisions about any persons' health care, let alone end-of-life options. The phrase "level of productivity in society" does not appear anywhere in the bill. The section is designed, so far as I can tell, so that people can set down their preferences to choose how they will die themselves, rather than having others make those decisions.

Nationalizing our health care system is a point of no return for government interference in the lives of its citizens.

Nothing in the bill would nationalize health care. It is possible that the 'public option,' a Medicare-like insurance available to anyone and government-run, could be more popular than private insurers and thus lead to that, but that thinking assumes that the 'public option' will be successful and people will freely choose it or people will be forced into it because private health insurance will not be able to compete. Either scenario assumes that the 'public option' will do a better job than private insurers in paying for health care, something that's hard to liken to nationalization.

I believe that there are two kinds of ideas in the world: those that divide things into two types, and those that don't... and then there's a third, which tries to wriggle out of either. This is one of those.

The basic idea: a better interface to data would be to turn the data itself into the interface, as a flow between an overview and actual experience.

What is an 'overview'?

• visual language of overview: parallel


• movie trailer, menu, signage


• graphs, piles, sorts, maps, matrices


• optimizes attention


• optimizes action


• browsing, analysis, editing, outlining, listing


• powerpoint, excel

What is 'experience'?

• visual language of experience: serial


• long, slow changes


• reading content


• still photos


• based on important details


• narrative


• based on sustained attention


• email & twitter

This is false duality of course; the actual value of either references the other, and both are necessary and interesting and have been around since the dawn of time. The reason this is an interesting thing to revisit is that there is a huge advantage in new media and social contexts: you can jump between them quickly and continuously, so that they start to merge into a 'flow.' This flow is an interface, perhaps a good one.

In basic terms, the flow interface resembles a lot of existing interfaces:

• a list of emails > reading an email


• table of contents > page


• map > walking

But the differences that would be possible include:

• use content itself in the overview, not a label/symbol/sign


• browse and refine both the overview and the experience


• interact with one through the other


• interaction with an overview element shows an experience


• interaction with an experience element references an overview

Now speed things up, so that the interface can offer:

• "you can sort this stuff into piles three ways, which one works the best?"


• "we have these three prototypes that show how the product could work"


• "have a taste of 12 dishes before you pick your meal, then change your mind halfway through"

And of course, this can benefit from the language of data visualization, but we need a framework for overviews and a framework for experiences, not just one, and the ability to pick the framework itself should be content-based and usable through familiar conventions:

• show proportional distances instead of vertices or measurements


• make maps


• show size relation, piles


• show a tree graph


• show nodes and edges

And here is where I sketch some actual designs for the very vague concepts I'm throwing around, but of course I haven't got there yet. But I think it would be easy to show new interfaces for twitter, netflix, and digg that work this way.

The below is my attempt to remove the frothy and breathless tone from "Generation M manifesto" by Umair Haque, because I liked it in many ways. It is definitely more boring, but I hope more real as well. I don't believe any manifesto can express the right amount of humility towards these questions, but it can emphasize belief in the possibility for something better, so I focused on that.

Dear gradualists, ideologues, and partisans,

We are in a time of large differences between groups, young and old, east and west, rich and poor, but one where many of the traditional ideologies seem to have been scrambled both by a global economy and crisis and fundamental changes in how information is shared through technology.

Everyday, we see the costs of doing the same things. It looks like some big, new, and huge problems are looming, but the solutions that are talked about are old, timeworn, and plain unambitious.

Old ideas of generational shift and left/right politics no longer seem to work. We can't use simple terms in this new, hypercomplex and interdependent world. We need a new way of seeing and strengthening the relationships we have, not a manifesto of ideas.

These times demand not single solutions, but systems of solutions, involving less large-scale business and more individual opportunity. Less ideology, and more practicality.

Businesses and governments must get connected to and become responsive to a public that is comfortable using social tools to express themselves in massive ways. The hyper-connected "sea of green" in Tehran is the model for a new, speeded-up politics.

Much of this new world no longer requires massive capital or leverage to work, and banks should play a smaller and more supporting role. A smaller role for finance means less focus on lucrative return.

The huge accumulation of risk and the massive gaming of global markets resulted in crisis. This should drive a lot of wealth away from financial instruments and towards tangible, collective works and accomplishments that everyone can benefit from.

Growth as a goal incentivizes distortion. We should prize flexibility and agility, so that no matter which way the markets go, business can prosper and act to benefit everyone.

Rather than nurturing a few elites (or even oligarchs), the new economy should be a huge number of distributed markets. It wouldn't be entirely controllable, and those that would want to profit from it will have to compete for influence just like everyone else.

We've seen the consequences of short-term thinking in spending and debt and felt the pain; now we should start working on ideas that are built to last a generation, not 5 years.

Our sense of ourselves has moved too far towards what we can do as individuals; it's time to nurture some shared beliefs, projects, and experiences.

Our culture should connect us to our shared past, and remind us that when it comes to the most meaningful things for human beings, there's usually nothing new under the sun.

In order to provide some label for what's needed, let's call it Generation "M."

This is not a movement in the traditional sense (our society is too distributed one manifesto, one protest, one set of ideas). It's more the recognition that a new set of norms is needed for a new time, the recognition of a shift. It's the belief that we can come up with practical ways to live and work together that do a better job at caring for each other.

Ideologies and manifestos will always run up against their own logical extremes. Gen M is the belief that innovative ideas married with historical consciousness and brutal practicality can be vastly more powerful, and meaningful.

Big changes will be necessary. The institutions and norms that we've lived within for a long time are too fragile to pass on to our children.

Since the end of the Cold War, we've lived with cheap, easy, expensive lifestyle, but one that was empty of meaning and for which we have little to show. Every age has a large responsibility, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday's profligacy -- and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.

Anyone -- young or old -- can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you want to build the new relationships, businesses, and systems we need? Or do you want to keep repeating the same old ideologies, marching in protests, or clinging to dying institutions?

Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook have seemingly converged on what has become the major reason to be connected to others on a social network: sharing short updates, links, photos, etc. A concept for mozilla's Firefox also looks similar, and lifts ideas from iTunes to help organize things. The designs share some major elements:

1. Publisher an area to enter some text, a url, or other media, to publish it out to friends or the public.
2. Items an area where items are listed, either most popular or latest items, or some subset of items
3. Sets an area where the set of items to show is chosen; it can be all items, items from certain friends or other sources, or user-created sets
4. Notifications two of the designs have an area to surface notifications, recommendations, alerts, or otherwise push to the user stuff that might be interesting

I like this design convergence, if only because establishing a vernacular for these kinds of sharable media apps will lead to more familiarity with the interface as more people start to use them, and form the basis for the next leap towards an interface that supports more sophisticated forms of sharing and publishing.

Douglas Bowman had to quit Google, and Valleywag explains it all for you (to hell with Owen!). I had a similar experience at Yahoo, so I'm only surprised Douglas lasted this long. The comments on Valleywag are really sad though; a palpable hostility towards "precious," "childish," "short-sighted" designers (you can look for yourself, I'm not linkin'). A lot of product design is really bad, sometimes the designers get a chance to do something really good with a job, but not often.

Jared Spool, an Extremely Important Person, once told me over Pad Thai that "visual designers are just failed artists." I took that personally, being a failed artist (heh), but didn't understand why the "visual" distinction was necessary... I guess he would have to be a failed artist as well if he just said "designers"? Or he has to get the frustration of just speaking at conferences out somehow.

Facebook's redesign inspires widespread unhappiness and derision. On Techcrunch, incredible bile is thrown at the designers. I can't say I like it, but why does anyone think that Facebook is anything other than an ongoing experiment? Facebook users are not "customers," they are collaborators in inventing new ways of being connected, and much is required of them sometimes. The new Facebook stuff is not very good, but at least they haven't given up like Irene Au and the crew at Google.

I have attempted to be useful as a designer, and had enough failures and successes to know a good deal of humility. There's no research method, process, innovation technique, conference presentation, or even extra-talented designer that magically makes good stuff.

UPDATE: Another comment thread at an article about designers quitting Google, filled with ignorant stuff. It really does seem that there is a cultural lack of understanding about design and what it is. I suppose the only real solution is to increase the overall cutlure's understanding and ability to parse visual and experiential elements; then (and probably only then) will people want a specialist to make the choices about those things instead...