Simple pencil, chalk and biro pen drawings are now common place in galleries around the world. These artists are taking ‘the basics’ to whole new heights. There are so many examples of amazing art made with the simplest of tools. here are just a few samples from some amazing artists that you should check out.

Quietly dropped at the end of the post, Cam includes his own hand-made gift to the digital world: the beautiful Sketch-Block font, free to download.

Also in the vein of hand-made and artful works, I recently spotted one of Rachel Ashe’s Altered Book pieces on @somisguided’s desk in our office. I wasn’t aware of these before, and found it absorbing in a way that can’t be conveyed on a screen. Lest you believe that hand-made art is on the decline, Cam and Rachel are providing ample evidence to the contrary.

…one’s inability to hack an iPad means precisely nothing. Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same.
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.

Amen. That treat was all the more enjoyable after finding it especially hard to read Cory Doctorow’s over the top rant against the iPad…

There are few people better informed and spoken than Cory when it comes to the problematic intersection of copyright law and digital rights. But his weekend rant foregoes a lot of logic and seems to seethe anger, something I’m not used to seeing in his writing. He even dips into the rhetorical war paint usually worn by the likes of Sarah Palin:

I remember the early days of the web — and the last days of CD ROM — when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for “my mom” (it’s amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers).

Complete with folksy language, he actually asserts that not caring about deep level access to the iPad means you’re against moms. (An f-bomb frothing Jeff Jarvis also employs this slimy framing, only bringing in Grandma to be his prop). Not too classy, but we say things when we’re angry.

You know, though, I also remember the CD ROM days. Oh, how fondly I recall guessing at video settings on a Windows 3.11 machine for hours to get movies to play. The child-like wonder in my eyes as I had the joy of tinkering forced onto me by trying to make something inadequate work as advertised. The good ol’ days.

Power Struggle

There are real reasons to revolt. The iPad isn't one of them

It’s too bad the post is smothered in Doctorow’s demands that the technology world follow his ideals, because buried in there are good points about re-sale rights of content. In the end I couldn’t stomach the underlying requirement of the self-annointed right to tinker:

That the vast majority of users must tolerate and adapt to the complexities required to give as much access as possible to the extreme minority who have the knowledge and skill to handle deep level access.

The spectacle of a rant turns to sad when we see how wrong these critics are: the iPad is hackable, but the catch is that you have to pass a skill-testing question called Jailbreaking. Early adopters passed this test within 24hrs of the iPad’s release this weekend. These people are truer hackers than those that Doctorow argues for, who seem to need a red carpet and latté waiting for them when they arrive. Maybe they will want to hack it, maybe not. The important thing is that Apple and its customers shoulder the cost for their opportunity to tinker.

Fantasy and Reality

When I read these iPad oh noes! posts I feel an echo of technology in the Star Wars movies: everything is exposed and always in a state of partial disassembly; doors snap open and closed with unforgiving speed, catwalks around control panels have no safety railings, and absolutely everything is open enough for R2 to hack into. I’m not sure I’d want to live in that world, though I love watching it.

Obi-Wan installs a camera driver

A technology made by a for-profit corporation is no place to look for champions of your political rights or ideals: that’s a recipe for ongoing frustration and disappointment. If he wants to really make the course of politics and law better, he should get into politics and law, and stop using the language of political rights as a proxy to getting his way with a product.

What I really hope Cory and others realize is that completely open technologies are not a zero-sum game. Apple has not taken away any hackable netbook, has not outlawed Linux and has not prevented anyone from coming up with alternatives to their tablet, which Android is poised to do at some point. I wonder if the real anger is that people actually like Apple’s decisions in this respect, and not the philosophical ideals that Cory and others take to heart.

Meanwhile, creativity and innovation seem the order of the day in the App Store, as demonstrated in a similarly fed up post by Giles Bowkett. But what I really look forward to seeing is people who have long felt alienated by computers and the geeks they need to save them, pick up something new and use it with ease. You know, the great experience, the one we all want to deliver. That’s the standard I’m aiming for and measuring by.

I knew it was coming for a couple weeks, but this tweet from @somisguided was one I’d been looking forward to:

Totally and utterly thrilled to launch the Namaste Publishing website: http://ow.ly/1kJDB

Seeing any work go live is a satisfying moment, and with the new Namaste Publishing site that is especially so for three reasons:

• the client vision
• the team I worked with
• the information architecture and experience design challenges in meeting the vision with the audience and subject matter

With all that going on, this project deserves a full writeup.

The Vision

When I joined the project last year, Monique had just concluded strategic sessions with the help of Boris Mann and Jordan Behan. In Monique’s words, taking that time revealed that Namaste didn’t just need ‘a website’:

Namaste’s online presence needed a radical reinvention and expansion. The team wanted a deeper long-term engagement with their community of fans, authors, spiritual leaders and staff. The project required a full re-branding and entire re-experience and re-interpretation of what publishing meant for the company.

That clear direction spoke to the business side of my brain, but I also wanted to get in touch with the motivation and emotion behind those goals. To do that, we had extensive conversations with Namaste’s founder and publisher, Constance Kellough, who brought all that and more to the table.

I learned that the entire Namaste team had been having the all-important conversation with their audience for years before hitting the web. They saw their audience becoming more interested in online experiences, but decided not to turn that interest into a mere sales channel. Instead, Constance focussed on the connections she had seen between authors and audiences, where the exchange of ideas took people between teacher and learner roles. It was that connection she wanted to bring to the web.

So our mission became clear: make a place on the web to facilitate that author-audience/teacher-learner dynamic, without the friction of time and geography, and enable Constance’s team to take Namaste’s mission beyond books.

The Team

In the proposal review process we decided to split graphic design as well as site programming between two groups, given their extraordinary portfolios in those areas: LiFT Studios on the visual rebranding, graphic design and multimedia production expertise, and Raincity Studios tackling the complexities of implementation.

These are the kinds of teams that contractors dream of: a passionate and empowering client, a tuned-in and calm project manager, great designers and skilled engineers. In the middle of all that was my part, the information architecture and user experience design.

The Challenges

The project presented unique challenges to the traditional IA and UX design processes. In most projects we discover the natural hierarchy of the content and boil down experience scenarios to a small number of optimal paths.

But solid pathways and silos of topics wouldn’t work in Namaste for two reasons. First, the content library ranges widely, from spirituality to brain science to nutrition and more. Second, much of the Namaste Publishing mission is not about leading people to growth and better lives, but about helping them find their path. The vision for the website involved many voices: authors writing various blogs, facilitated discussions, and all sorts of content types including audio, video, books and so on.

Hand in hand with the content was the audience profiling, which brought a mix of age groups, educational and cultural backgrounds, and varying familiarity with Namaste and its mission. We would be serving multiple audiences with no single unifying traits other than a curiosity about life and personal growth.

The Solutions

Working closely with Monique and Mary Kellough (now of MustBe Marketing), and later with key input from the LiFT team, we spent several days workshopping various concepts. That collaboration produced 3 key supports of the IA and experience design:

• Clear separation of Store
• Low Detail, orientation-based Navigation
• Range of ways to participate in the community aspects

Clear Separation of the Store

It was stressed to us from the start that the commercial aspects of Namaste Publishing couldn’t interfere with the broader mission for the website. In response, we made the store its own category, using a layout that differentiated those pages clearly from others. Where store titles are incorporated into the site, they link to the store but are cannot be purchased except by going to the store. By doing so, we created spaces that don’t feel commercial while ensuring that the store could be recognized as such, no matter how a guest enters the site.

Navigation

Rather than cram the entire site contents into the navigation, we used a structure that started from the most basic intentions of the audience: personal exploration, or connecting with others for sharing and learning. We named these two primary paths Inspiration and Community, adding to them the Home and Store categories for an easy to digest navigation. Under each we kept menus short to progressively narrow the paths from these very broad starting points, but not too specifically to avoid list overload.

Without the full complement of categories in the navigation menus, we were placing a lot of weight on people using search to find something specific. Moreover, there were concerns about getting across the range of Namaste’s subject matter. To bring attention to search and cue people to the range of topics, we made a search box with some clearly suggested topics which are updated regularly to reflect current topics.

To handle the need for details, we added a fat footer to the bottom of each page, which included the basic site architecture as well as a lot of specific links associated with the site’s content and the customer service needs of the store. I’ve made some fat footers in my time, but this is the biggest of them all.

Range of Engagement

Given the diverse audience, we knew there would be a range of willingness to participate in the community aspects of the site. We met that range with a number of participatory features.

Gratitude

Gratitude is the simplest engagement, a single gesture on discussions, comments, blog posts, books, and even member profiles. Gratitude gestures convey good will, and are remembered by the system as markers of content that a member can revisit later.

It’s similar to the Thanks feature in Gnolia, but with an important difference: Gratitudes are public acts in the Namaste community, so they’re displayed on member profiles for others to see, whereas we’d kept Thanks as a more intimate act between two members in Gnolia.

Spiritual Status

Going up the scale of engagement effort we designed a Spiritual Status space, much like a tweet or Facebook status, but cast as an invitation to check in with the spiritual side of life. Appearing at the top of the Community section, this feature is a way for the community to discover and re-discover each other through their own words.

Spiritual Dictionary

Knowing that some members of the Namaste audience could be verbose in sharing their insights, we searched for a way to give those people more room to be expressive. We wanted to avoid setting up countless soap-boxes, and focussed on something that people could add collaborate around while being expressive. The solution was a dictionary of spiritual terms, to which any member can add their own perspective, allowing others to browse different takes on what are sometimes elusive concepts.

Blog Comments and Discussion Forums

These are the regular stock in trade for many web communities, and we knew that they many members would be right at home with them. While the blog comments are pretty standard, a twist on the discussion forums was to only allow moderators to post new topics, and to frame the discussions around specific subjects.

Summing Up

Since the site launched, I’ve been watching those community features quite closely to see how they’re used, and talking with Monique and Mary about the response from the community. Early results have been very positive, both in use and comments, and it will be enlightening (no pun) to see where this community takes the new namastepublishing.com.

Version 1

I met my good friend Sheila West in a previous life at MPS Development in North Vancouver. We worked together and found ourselves of like mind on the importance of usability, design thinking, and the importance of aesthetics in software design.

When I decided to go solo, Sheila created the first visual treatment of the brand, along with a site design that conveyed the creative and more technical aspects of what I do. The focus at that time was requirements discovery and documentation, only to shift to a more full product and interaction design focus a couple years later.

Sheila’s was the only version of the site to feature the crow imagery. On knowing that Corvus is the family of crows, ravens and magpies, I’m usually asked ‘why that?’ The answer: I really like these birds. They’re clever, social, curious and can be a little loud; I share those qualities in different degrees, so I went with it. I got some feedback that crows do historically have a bad rap as symbols, so in the next version the crow image went away, but I stuck with the name. If you didn’t know it, crows are also a bit stubborn.

Version 2

I never met Damien Tanner in person but I got to know his work through his Ma.gnolia Blossom dashboard widget. Motivated to get on the content management bus, I chose Rails-based Typo and contracted Damien to set one up with a fresh look at the theme. He did so, and came up with something quite transformative. I don’t have a screenshot of the site as Damien did it, but his work was the basis of the theme I was using until today.

It was in this version I dispensed with a formal homepage in favour of brining visitors directly into the lifeblood of what I do: thinking about what makes great software. To stand in for the orienting value of a homepage, we brought in the Introduction Box, the yellow space at the top that can be closed from view for those who know me and what I do.

Version 3

A couple years later I asked Eric Grossnickle of Mighty Dream if he would do a little touch-up work on the theme. I knew Eric from advising on his social web app thesis project, and was impressed with his talent, now evidenced by his growing portfolio.

Eric freshened up Damien’s theme and added some convenience macros to Typo, but his most important contribution was off the website where he came up with a new business card. It was a radical departure in brand, but came at the right time as I was well into working with Ma.gnolia and had grown more interested in product design and strategy, as well as the social web.

Version 3

As the Typo project get more and more quiet, WordPress really took off, so I eventually asked Tzaddi Gordon of ThriveWire Media to migrate the site to WordPress and to re-create its look in a custom theme. She did so, adding some considerate additions like a dynamic 404 page to go with a well-coded theme and setup.  I’m really happy with WordPress, but couldn’t have made the move if I felt like I was giving up something in Typo. Tzaddi made sure that didn’t happen, and it’s been smooth sailing since. Except when I break it, which is when Tzaddi steps in again to fix my completely innocent missteps.

Version 4

Today I’m happy to unveil another big jump forward for the site, this time crafted by local designer and musician Frederick Brummer (aka Overmind Productions). I met Frederick through his day job at LiFT Studios when we worked on a project last year, and really liked his design style and insights.

Frederick did an extensive collaboration with me to figure out where to take the site, bringing a great deal to the new theme beyond pixels and code. He also put a lot of work into the site’s typography, something I had only given passing attention to in previous versions. The improvements that a change in typeface can bring are striking. Yes, I have seen Helvetica, but I can still be surprised by the impact of type.

The Twist

Here we are, then, up to date. I have a weird thing about my site: I only ask someone to work on it once. I’ve been very happy with and recommend everyone I mention here, but I love the idea of every revision being a totally new look at where I’m at. Doing this keeps me mindful that design isn’t just about making something, that its process often reveals what is otherwise unnoticed.

I don’t take this approach in my regular work, saving the eccentricity for my own properties rather than clients’. That makes it more fun, of course, and turns my own site into a project that pushes me into new areas in unexpected ways. I couldn’t do it any other way. Here’s to a great 2010.

It’s hard to argue that understanding what something does should not be as immediate and easy as possible. There are exceptions, such as in games where exploration and challenge happen in part by decrypting the utility and purpose of the unfamiliar.

Embracing that maxim, however, can lead us to dismiss the reasoning behind a design choice when the need itself isn’t immediately obvious. I learned just that by taking a close look at the recent update to the Apple Remote and its puzzling addition of a Play/Pause button.

I didn’t need this remote: there are 3 of the first-generation remotes bundled with MacBooks kicking around my place already. But knowing that Apple doesn’t add buttons willy-nilly, I did need to understand why that Play/Pause button had been added, so off went my $19 and into my hand a svelte new remote.

The previous model used the primary Select button to fill the Play/Pause role with minimalist perfection. The new model retains that functionality, so the distinct Play/Pause button seemed even more superfluous in use than it did at first sight. My obsessive little puzzle deepened.

Context, Context, Context

It wasn’t until I was actually using the remote in the context that the extra button was added for that I realized why it was there.

The problem it solves is that the media navigation applications that the remote works with (AppleTV and FrontRow, specifically) use some very deep-nesting of hierarchical menus and modes. The approach is a tradeoff to achieve a 10-foot UI paradigm that media centres currently rely on. If video is playing, moving back to other menus just stops the video. If audio is playing, however, a person can navigate throughout most of the system without stopping the music (or podcast, audiobook, etc).

I’d run into this many times with the previous remote, where I wanted to pause the audio but had wandered far and away from the Now Playing interface. That Now Playing space is the only one where the primary select button on the older remote would pause playback instead of selecting something, and getting back to Now Playing could easily be five or more clicks. With the new remote it’s just one, no matter where in the interface I happen to end up during playback.

The experience has me thinking that the best kind of design obviousness is the one that surfaces only when it’s needed. The functional semantics of a control need to be easily understood, but we should also be willing to place those controls where they’ll be needed, even if that need isn’t obvious at first blush.

Yet when we talk about email we often focus on the the shortcomings and misuses. Given the misunderstandings, misdirections and scamming that goes on in email, it’s no surprise that email gets a bad rap that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. Just like the shark.

I really got thinking about just how long email has lasted after hearing the CBC Spark story A World Without Email. At the heart of the piece is an experiment by IBM Social Media Evangelist Luis Suarez. Luis abandoned work-related email and replaced it with a collection of social information tools: wikis, blogs, microblogs, and so on. He has some great bosses; I never would have gotten away with that.

The title is a bit sensational, missing that email is itself an essentially social tool, but I heard a lot of what I agree with. Email traps information in its distribution lists, natively resisting the flow of knowledge to where it should go. That very aspect makes email an unwitting hider of facts and an easily-enlisted accomplice to political maneuvering. Sharing organizational knowledge in web-based systems just makes sense.

But the story left me uncomfortable. I use social knowledge tools all the time: blogs, wikis, forums, bug trackers, link sharing, the works. But I start the productive part of almost every day with email. If the new tools are so effective, what’s bringing me back to the inbox?

I chatted with Luis (via Twitter) to suggest that email still fills a viable niche (even if I couldn’t name it). In the conversation I mentioned that I always saw notice of a new direct message first by email, he said he got his by RSS. The light went on for me: email had moved from being where I did the talking to telling me where the conversations were happening.

Same Animal, New Niche

Most email I get notifies me about changes on the various web applications I use. The inbox in this use shifts from a place for electronic letters to a hub for attention management, helping me figure out which individuals, projects and communities to engage with, without having to visit all of them first.

How can we optimize email for this new role that its filling as we use more web-based services with frequent updates? We can’t change the world of email clients easily, but we can make software use email as effectively as possible:

1. Don’t Break Email. This means no ‘no-reply’ addresses. They all have to come back to support or try to handle the response. The users don’t have it wrong when they reply to a no-reply email; they have it right, and are saying that email needs to work both ways.
2. Include response actions in notifications. Click to Unsubscribe in newsletters is probably the earliest example of this idea, and can be expanded by considering user would want to do from that message and putting those actions within reach.
3. Say what you can in the message. An email notification shouldn’t be a reason for people to visit the website that sends it, unless it’s necessary to visit the site in order to take action on the news it delivers.
4. Provide alternatives to email. RSS, Twitter integration or SMS messaging are all viable alternatives to using email for update notifications. It’s unwise to over-rely on email as it is to ignore it in an application’s communication design.

I’ve never been able to get all of these ideas implemented in one product before. They’re not trivial to design and implement, but those that can be achieved will likely impact most if not all users. That’s a good bang to buck ratio for any product manager.

Email’s central idea works well enough that it can keep finding efficiencies despite its disadvantages and the innovations of the web that’s grown around it. It only seems natural that we leverage what we can from one of the internet’s most resiliant design patterns.

Garrett’s application, Ego (iTunes Link), lets iPhone users check in on their Google Analytics stats on the go. A snafu with Analytics caused his app to be blocked, but in true web spirit Google and Garrett worked out the problem, and an update to Ego was submitted into the App Store’s approval process, which takes about a week.

Meanwhile, on the App Store and Get Satisfaction, Ego customers reacted badly, giving rise to the Garrett’s two core grievances on how commenting on the App Store and elsewhere works:

• Reviewers can be quick to criticize and don’t read every detail before doing so.
• The App Store doesn’t give developers a way to respond to specific comments, or comments in general.

These are fair criticisms, one rooted in problematic human-computer expectations (and if we acronymize that to HCE, we can go on speaking tour), and the other in the design of the interface at the App Store. Along with people commenting on Ego’s problem, we have Google Analytics and the App Store not coming off very well. But there’s a fourth leg in this interaction dance, which is how the Ego app itself handled the unexpected use case of being blocked by Google. Here’s the use case that needed to be accommodated: Google Analytics responds and has not reported invalid user credentials, but does not answer requests for data. At this point the application would display an error indicating that Google Analytics is reachable but isn’t cooperating for unknown reasons. The message can be extended to prompt users to check the developer’s blog, a separate page for the Ego app status, or a support email.

This isn’t to pick on what Garrett did or didn’t do when writing Ego, but his experience is a pointer to a broader need that any application designed to work with third party services needs to meet. When we make apps that provide windows into data managed by other services, we’re acting as a concierge or host for the experience facilitated by using that data. As such, we need to be good hosts, anticipating and explaining on behalf of those we partner with, even when they screw up in ways we can’t control.

The relationships in integrating with a third-party service used to just go three ways: app maker, app customer and the external service. As the gateway to what I think of as a managed environment, the App Store adds even more spin for developers to deal with. It makes things more complicated (yet predictable).

And then there’s the people factor. No matter what the technical relationship is between an application and the services it uses to assemble the data it presents, the user experience focusses on the app. If they love it, their love focus on that app and say nothing about the third-party services that play a critical role. If they are upset with it, their vitriol will focus on that app and say nothing… you probably see where I’m going here. If you put on the clothes of the concierge, be prepared to account for what you can’t control, both in the software itself and in customer feedback.

It’s the new reality, but it’s not an impossible one to deal with. Just remember that if you want to carry your water in a four-legged dance, bring lots of paper towels and a smile to clean up the spills.