Monthly Archives: June 2011

Beyond the Faster Horse Problem

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“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford

We’ve been talking a lot about Responsive Design in the Studio lately. That’s because as web designers, it’s our job to think years ahead of our clients. It’s not like print publishing – the technology of viewing a page with your eyes hasn’t changed for quite some time. You can be fairly certain that in five years, the magazine on the shelf will still be perfectly legible and attractive.

Not so with websites, which are viewed with an ever-changing constellation of possible “eyes,” in all sort of different sizes, speeds, and orientations. In addition to a desktop or laptop computer, we have cell phones and iPads. Many folks are increasingly using services like Instapaper or Safari Reader, which strip all design away, leaving only text for your articles. And of course people view your website in far more contexts than before, often in very hurried environments which are much different than the atmosphere we design in.

But attempting to ignore these changes is a mistake. Every website needs a Five Year Plan, because that’s how long we believe a good web design should last, which means we have to anticipate those changes. The urge is to ignore that, to keep on building the same single-fixed-sized designs, to keep building faster horses. For years, that’s what we’ve been doing.

It’s time to embrace the true complexity of the web. As we’ve been doing this for our last few projects, I wanted to share some of the insights we’d gained from the process.


Design Patterns for WordPress Websites

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A design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. Read on for our thoughts about how this concept can be applied to web design... and why.

It’s important to have more than one field of interest, especially on a professional level. You never know when the concepts of one discipline will be useful in another. While software programming and web design aren’t exactly opposites, I’ve always felt that web design could benefit more from some heavier programming concepts. What we need are more design patterns for our web work.


The Importance of Restaurant Website Mobility

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There are many reasons that you should not ever put your restaurant website in Flash. We explore but a few.

This past Saturday, Ray and I had the rare opportunity to have breakfast out alone together without our toddler. Needless to say, we were thrilled. We remembered a particularly enjoyable breakfast we had months ago with friends at Simpatica Dining Hall, jumped in the car, and headed over. Part way there, we realized that we hadn’t checked their hours and pulled up their website on an iPhone. This is what came up.

When we arrived at the restaurant, we discovered Simpatica is only open for brunch on Sunday (their blog makes this obvious, but there was no link to the blog on my phone) and so we embarassingly walked into a restaurant that was being set-up for a catering event.

We’re not trying to point fingers at this restaurant. We love their food and everything they stand for. Instead, this serves as a reminder and a perfect example of how important it is to consider how customers interact with your website.

We’ve talked mobile restaurant websites before and we may start to sound like a broken record, but restaurant websites (in particular) that ignore mobile devices are doing their customers and their business a huge disservice. And designers that offer flash websites to restaurants… well, just don’t get me started.

Here’s the deal: Before Apple introduced the iPhone mid-2007, Flash websites were an attractive online option. Four years later, with Apple platforms like the iPad and iPhone, technology has evolved and enabled anyone to access the internet anywhere at any time. This changes the name of the game. Since Apple doesn’t install Adobe’s Flash onto their mobile devices, websites that are presented in Flash are completely inaccessible to iPhone/iPad users (and let’s face it, who doesn’t have an iPhone nowadays).

You work hard to satisfy your customers and send them rushing home to write winning reviews on your excellent service and drool-worthy faire. And, in foodie capitols like Portland, diners are usually on the go and use apps like Yelp and AroundMe to look up reviews and find directions to the best restaurants near by. When your stars are shining bright on those review sites, and hungry customers can’t click fast enough to learn more about you, how disheartening is it when they find out their iPhone can’t access your location, hours or menu? Who wants to lose business to a website that is inaccessible on your customers’ mobile device?

“In The Courgette Restaurant Website Survey, more than 80% of customers stated that they have visited a restaurant website on their mobile device,” says restaurant marketing website, The Blackboard. “This reason alone should probably be enough to avoid Flash.”

Finally, as designers, we believe it is our job to stand up and give you our expert opinion. There is no excuse anymore for creating Flash sites for restaurants. We know the facts about their ineffectiveness and we understand the harm to your business by creating them. We also believe in educating our clients, so in the end, everyone’s happy. Especially your customers.

Why Design Mobile First?

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Why don't we make websites for our clients? Why do we design for mobile devices first? Please... allow us to explain...

I was reading over Luke Wroblewski’s notes from a talk by Ethan Marcotte this morning, and musing over mobile and responsive design. One of the big challenges for a forward-thinking web design shop is to sell these ideas to our clients. This is because we don’t see it as our job to design something for our them, per se. We design for someone else.

Huh? Let me explain.

When building a website, we are picturing a typical visitor. But such a visitor isn’t necessarily here and now. More likely, we’re picturing someone who might visit the website next year, since we plan for websites to have lasting value. They’re quite possibly not familiar with our client or their offerings at all. And we certainly don’t assume they’re using our client’s 27-inch iMac. They’re in the back seat of a car, en route, looking at their phone, and in a big hurry. Or they’re on an iPad, at a coffee shop, trying to decide where to get their bike repaired. Or maybe they’re on some crazy device that hasn’t even been invented yet.

These are all distinct possibilities, and arguably more likely than a “desktop PC” situation. So why do so many website designs still begin with the assumption that the visitor is sitting in front of a fancy computer?

Possibly the biggest problem is of course that’s where the designer is sitting. I’m guilty of this myself. Not coincidentally, my display is 27 inches. So I have to play tricks on myself to get to thinking about these other people. And designing for them – not myself or my client. It means embracing the unique traits of the web as a medium, and letting go of the urge to design a vast, pixel-perfect mockup in Photoshop.

The answer is to design for mobile first, and then expand the design outward from there. It takes some getting used to, and it takes some careful thought and planning, but the result is a site that can be enjoyed equally by every visitor, and penalizes none. Such sites are vital, moving forward, because they prioritize the user experience. It’s great that the iPhone can show a 1000-pixel design in a two-inch-wide space, but believe it or not, no-one is actually going to enjoy the experience. No one is going to stick around to read the menu, catch up on the news, or buy the product.

We’re very excited to see Web Design finally – and fully – come into its own as a medium. 2011 is the year that Needmore embraces mobile first and responsive design, and we have a hunch we’re not the only ones.

(If you’re interested in the technical details driving these decisions, be sure to read Jason Grigsby’s excellent article on the Cloud Four Blog.)

Our Thoughts on Stumptown

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There’s been a lot of press and a lot of speculation about Stumptown’s independence and financial status, owing to some blogs, some reporting, and a letter from the founder himself. I wanted to add my two cents, since I feel I have a unqiue – though by no means insider – perspective on the matter.

First, full disclosure. I was Stumptown’s first employee. I worked closely with Duane in the early years, eventually parting ways to start a web design company with my future wife. Stumptown was our first client, and they’ve been our client ever since. We’ve been with them through several website designs, through thick and thin.

Like I said, I can’t comment on the speculation. I have learned that they found an investor, and that they have a bigger budget now to do the things they want to do.

Duane has always had big, long term vision. I haven’t always understood it, but as with many visionaries, his wild ideas usually work out. And he has changed less than you might imagine. (Basically, he has a beard now.) I had a reliable job with health coverage when he started Stumptown, and I wasn’t entirely sure he could make a hole-in-the-wall roastery work way out in Southeast Portland. I figured he could. Clearly, he did.

I will speak to what I know. Stumptown could hire some big fancy New York web design firm, full of people who ate at “fancy restaurants” and “wore suits” and didn’t “smell funny.” They could behave as if they were “selling out.”

But that isn’t the case. We’ve been in meetings with the Stumptown crew, and I can tell you it’s the same locals we’ve always worked with, in the same neighborhood. And I’m happy to report that they’re working with the same small, scrappy Southeast Portland independent web design firm they always have.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that’s changed in the past few months is that they can finally afford to move forward with this project that we’ve all been excited about for a year now. Nothing else has changed.

Over the past week or two we’ve been to all of the local Portland cafes to get a perspective to help in our redesign efforts and once again, I’m struck by how many of these people worked behind the bar with me ten years ago. The same people, the same smiling faces, making coffee that’s better than it’s ever tasted before. They all seem excited to know that Stumptown will be able to get even better and that the family will continue to grow.

Duane Sorenson is a good guy, with as much compassion, vision, and integrity as anyone I’ve ever known. I can’t see into the future, but I believe that his decisions will turn out to be good ones.

iCloud and The AppleTV Problem

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How we think Apple's forthcoming iCloud service could solve our AppleTV problems... and several more while they're at it.

A couple of months ago, we decided to get rid of DirecTV. It was costing us about $100 a month, and we didn’t use it enough. Since Spring was here and Summer around the corner, we figured we’d cancel our service and switch to the AppleTV instead. We knew it would be a compromise, and we’d miss out on a few special showings that we really enjoyed, but we also realized we were bound to save a ton of money. Any way we looked at it, we were going to save a lot, avoid commercials altogether, and have a more flexible arrangement since we could watch shows on a number of devices.

But a problem quickly presented itself. An AppleTV doesn’t have storage per se, but simply streams media. This is great if you are renting something, but there’s a lot of programming that can’t be streamed, generally because most studios are reluctant to allow 99 cent streaming of their shows. And those that do still have the “two year old problem” as we call it – our daughter likes to watch a very small number of shows a lot. She’ll watch a given episode two dozen times before she gets tired of it. And the rental terms, while often reasonable, aren’t great in a situation like that.

Therefore, we end up purchasing certain programs, particularly seasons of shows that our daughter really likes. But of course, those can’t be stored on the AppleTV, so you need a Mac around. You cannot, unfortunately, just store them on a Time Capsule, despite the fact that we have a 1GB Time Capsule here. That’s frustrating, but it’s because the Time Capsule just acts as a dumb hard drive, and there’s no way to move its content around in a smart enough way.

To solve this, I would often leave my laptop out at night. But laptops have very limited storage and you can’t really expect them to stay on very much. I would take it to work every day, so all of the programming we’d purchased would be unavailable at home. In the end, we put a Mac Mini in our living room, but that’s not going to work for most people, because that’s a $699 computer. It’s not very compelling to purchase an AppleTV for $99 when you realize you need to spend a lot more to make it fully functional and useful to you.

So that’s where we are at. We have a device that lets us use the AppleTV the way we want, whenever we want. It’s not cheap but it was fine for us since we kind of wanted a computer in the living room for quick work tasks anyway. And there it sits.

For most people, Apple could solve this problem in a much more elegant way. If the Airport device was smarter, and could take the place of my Mac for a lot cheaper, that would be hugely helpful. Then, the AppleTV (which also runs the same CPU as the iPhone) could be used to purchase shows like I do on my Mac, but they would be stored on my Airport device. This would be brilliant.

When taking a step back, it becomes clear to me that an iCloud service, when coupled with an intelligent device like the Airport and an update to the iTunes software, could be a very powerful combination. It could make all your software purchases and updates faster and more reliable. It could make your media purchases more flexible and more reliable as well, since it could handle backups at the same time (at Apple’s data server).

It might also be able to take the place of the cumbersome “storage and transfer” of data that iPhone apps employ now. When you connect an iOS device to your Mac, you can see that some apps have their own “folder” where they store their data. You can bring files in and out of there, but only when your device is connected. Imagine if your Airport and/or iCloud kept that in sync in the background (only when you’re on wifi already, to save battery) and made it available somewhere like your iDisk. Just like your files, calendar, bookmarks, contacts, and mail, you’d be able to get to the storage for all your favorite iPhone and iPad apps as well, from any other device.

Of course it’s never as simple as it sounds, and I feel like that’s why it’s taken Apple so long to make this happen. They are notorious for taking their time on features to be sure they get them right. I feel that in many cases, they have lately been releasing very simplistic implementations of features they may or may not flush out down the road. Notifications in iOS are a good example of this. They are by far the simplest of any contemporary mobile operating system, but even if Apple overhauled the system, they could keep the API identical for programmers. Just as they could for in-app file storage. To a developer, things might not change one bit. But for users, this could be huge.

Distraction-Free Writing and WordPress 3.2

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There is a lot of software that lets you write “distraction-free” at the moment. It’s a hot category. A quick look through the Mac App Store reveals a half dozen of those apps, at least. There are one or two that I like, and in general, I think Mac apps are headed in that direction anyway. The forthcoming Mac OS X Lion will offer a full-screen mode for many apps, which means that even a standard text editor could become “distraction-free” with a click of a mous

This type of interface is also coming to WordPress next month. You will be able to click a button in your editor – when editing any text on your site – and be able to see your text without any interface at all. This is exciting news for us, because the WordPress admin interface can feel rather cluttered. When you have a lot of writing to do, you don’t want to be looking at menus, categories, tags, SEO options, and more. You will need that interface when you’re ready to publish, sure, but you don’t want to see it when you’re trying to concentrate. All you’ll be looking at is the post title and body text, in a column that’s not too wide to work in. As it should be.

It’s fitting that this appears around the same time as Lion. It means that you can take Safari (or Chrome) full screen, and you have the same functionality as an app you would pay for. Better yet, WordPress still saves your work-in-progress while you’re writing. If something bad happens, you can come back to WordPress and your text will still be there, in draft form. You can finish it up and publish.

We think this improvement – along with a number of others – will make next month’s WordPress 3.2 a very exciting release for WordPress users, which includes many of Needmore’s clients. We’ll be sure to post some tips and tutorials when it comes out, but you can always get in touch if you’d like to sit down with us in person and chat.