Tags: value

To remember, or to forget?

What are your own scribbles, your own ordinary plenty, not worth much to you now but that someone in the future may treasure?

Invisible success – Eric Bailey

Snook’s Law in action:

Big, flashy things get noticed. Quiet, boring things don’t.

There isn’t much infrastructure in place to quantify the constant, silent, boring, predictable, round-the-clock passive successes of this aspect of design systems after the initial effort is complete.

A lack of bug reports, accessibility issues, design tweaks, etc. are all objectively great, but there are no easy datapoints you can measure here.

Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease - Snook.ca

I hereby dub this Snook’s Law:

Any working system can become invisible to the point where the system loses value because it’s working.

Hixie’s Natural Log: Reflecting on 18 years at Google

On leaving the company, Hixie compares the Google of old to what it has become today:

Google’s culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision. Transparency evaporated. Where previously I would eagerly attend every company-wide meeting to learn what was happening, I found myself now able to predict the answers executives would give word for word. Today, I don’t know anyone at Google who could explain what Google’s vision is. Morale is at an all-time low. If you talk to therapists in the bay area, they will tell you all their Google clients are unhappy with Google.

A prayer wheel for capitalism

Why “AI” won’t help you get past the blank page in any meaningful way:

The value in writing lies in what we discover while writing.

The one about AI - macwright.com

Writing, both code and prose, for me, is both an end product and an end in itself. I don’t want to automate away the things that give me joy.

And that is something that I’m more and more aware of as I get older – sources of joy. It’s good to diversify them, to keep track of them, because it’s way too easy to run out. Or to end up with just one, and then lose it.

The thing about luddites is that they make good punchlines, but they were all people.

The Web Needs a Native .visually-hidden

I agree with the reasoning here—a new display value would be ideal.

There’s a repeated catchphrase used throughout Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet: ignorance is our ammunition.

There are certainly situations where knowledge is regrettable. The somewhat-silly thought experiment of Roko’s basilisk is one example. Once you have knowledge of it, you can’t un-know it, and so you become complicit.

Or, to use another example, I think it was Jason who told me that if you want to make someone’s life miserable, just teach them about typography. Then they’ll see all the terrible kerning out there in the world and they won’t be able to un-see it.

I sometimes wish I could un-learn all I’ve learned about cryptobollocks (I realise that the term “cryptocurrency” is the more widely-used phrase, but it’s so inaccurate I’d rather use a clearer term).

I sometimes wish I could go back to having the same understanding of cryptobollocks as most people: some weird new-fangled technology thing that has something to do with “the blockchain.”

But I delved too deep. I wanted to figure out why seemingly-smart people were getting breathlessly excited about something that sounds fairly ludicrous. Yet the more I learned, the more ludicrous it became. Bitcoin and its ilk are even worse than the occassional headlines and horror stories would have you believe.

As Jules says:

The reason I have such a visceral reaction to crypto projects isn’t just that they’re irresponsibly designed and usually don’t achieve what they promise. It’s also that the thing they promise sounds like a fucking nightmare.

Or, as Simon responded to someone wondering why there was so much crypto hate:

We hate it because we understand it.

I have yet to encounter a crypto project that isn’t a Ponzi scheme. I don’t mean like a Ponzi scheme. I mean they’re literally Ponzi schemes: zero-sum racing to the bottom built entirely on the greater fool theory. The only difference between traditional Ponzi schemes and those built on crypto is that crypto isn’t regulated. Yet.

I recently read The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, a novel with the collapse of a Ponzi scheme at its heart. In the aftermath of the scheme’s collapse, there are inevitable questions like “How could you not know?” The narrator answers that question:

It’s possible to both know and not know something.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

Clearleft recently took on a project that involves cryptobollocks. Just to be clear, the client is not a fly-by-night crypto startup. This is an established financial institution. It’s not like Mike’s shocking decision to join Kraken of all places.

But in some ways, the fact that this is a respected company almost makes it worse. It legitimises cryptobollocks. It makes it more likely for “regular” folk to get involved (and scammed).

Every Thursday we have an end-of-week meeting and get a summary of how various projects are going. Every time there’s an update about the cryptobollocks project, my heart sinks. By all accounts, the project is going well. That means smart and talented people are using the power of design to make the world a little bit worse.

What will the metrics of success be for this project? Will success be measured by an increase in the amount of Bitcoin trading? I find it hard to see how that can possibly be called successful.

And I haven’t even mentioned the environmental impact of proof-of-work.

Right now, Clearleft is in the process of trying to become a B corp. It’s a long process that involves a lot of box-ticking to demonstrate a genuine care for the environment. There’s no checkbox about cryptobollocks. And yet the fact that we might enable even a few transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain makes a complete mockery of all of our sustainability initiatives.

This is why I wish I could un-know what I know. I wish I could just hear the project updates and say, “Crypto? Don’t know much about it.” But I can’t.

For seventeen years, I’ve felt nothing but pride in the work that Clearleft has done. I’d happily talk about any one of the case studies we’ve worked on. Even on projects that didn’t pan out as expected, or that had all sorts of tricky complications, the work has always been second-to-none. To quote the Agile prime directive:

Everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

Now, for the first time, I can’t get past that phrase “what they knew at the time.” On the one hand, I’m sure that when they started this project, none of my colleagues knew quite how damaging cryptobollocks is. On the other hand, the longer the project goes on, the harder it is to maintain that position.

It’s possible to both know and not know something.

This is a no-win situation. If the project goes badly, that’s not good for Clearleft or the client. But if the project goes well, that’s not good for the world.

There’s probably not much I can do about this particular project at this point. But I can at least try to make sure that Clearleft doesn’t take on work like this again.

Reinventing W3C Governance

To be honest, I’m not all that convinced by Robin’s arguments here about overhauling the governance model at the World Wide Web Consortium (partly because the way he describes the current model sounds pretty okay to me). But I’m very interested in what he has to say in the broader philosophical sense about using values to solve problems:

A value is worth something if it’s there to help you when the rubber hits the road and starts hydroplaning. Sure, you’ll need a handful of high-level lofty values as reminders, if only because there’s always a vocal guy (it’s always a guy) who thinks it’s just outrageous to put people before profits. But mostly you want Values You Can Use.

That might be the best description I’ve come across yet for design principles: values you can use.

When we say that engineering is about trade-offs, we’re saying that engineers solve their hardest problems using values (which they call “heuristics” because everyone’s entitled to be fancy some). In implementing a system, you might need to decide between an option that provides people with the best experience, another that delivers the greatest value to the shareholders, and yet a third one that makes the control centre blinkenlights dance in the prettiest way.

The impoverished language of business | Clearleft

A good post by Andy on “the language of business,” which is most cases turns out to be numbers, numbers, numbers.

While it seems reasonable and fair to expect a modicum of self-awareness of why you’re employed and what business value you drive in the the context of the work you do, sometimes the incessant self-flagellation required to justify and explain this to those who hired you may be a clue to a much deeper and more troubling question at the heart of the organisation you work for.

This pairs nicely with the Clearleft podcast episode on measuring design.

What Can You Put in a CSS Variable? / Coder’s Block

A reminder that the contens of custom properties don’t have to be valid property values:

From a syntax perspective, CSS variables are “extremely permissive”.

mnot’s blog: RFC8890: The Internet is for End Users

RFC 8890 maybe the closest thing we’ve got to a Hippocratic oath right now.

A community that agrees to principles that are informed by shared values can use them to navigate hard decisions.

Also worth noting:

Many discussions influenced this document, both inside and outside of the IETF and IAB. In particular, Edward Snowden’s comments regarding the priority of end users at IETF 93 and the HTML5 Priority of Constituencies were both influential.

Currying in CSS? | Trys Mudford

I don’t understand what currying is, but Trys points out a really interesting thing about custom properties in CSS:

The value after the : in the CSS custom property does not have to be valid CSS.

That means you can use custom properties to store arbitrary strings of text, which can then be combined within a calc() function, at which point they get evaluated.

There have been some great new CSS properties and values shipping in Firefox recently.

Miriam Suzanne explains the difference between the newer revert value and the older inherit, initial and unset values in a video on the Mozilla Developer channel:

display: revert;

In another video, Jen describes some new properties for styling underlines (on links, for example):

text-decoration-thickness:  0.1em;
text-decoration-color: red;
text-underline-offset: 0.2em;
text-decoration-skip-ink: auto;

Great stuff!

As far as I can tell, all of these properties are available to you regardless of whether you are serving your website over HTTP or over HTTPS. That may seem like an odd observation to make, but I invite you to cast your mind back to January 2018. That’s when the Mozilla Security Blog posted about moving to secure contexts everywhere:

Effective immediately, all new features that are web-exposed are to be restricted to secure contexts. Web-exposed means that the feature is observable from a web page or server, whether through JavaScript, CSS, HTTP, media formats, etc. A feature can be anything from an extension of an existing IDL-defined object, a new CSS property, a new HTTP response header, to bigger features such as WebVR.

(emphasis mine)

Despite that “effective immediately” clause, I haven’t observed any of the new CSS properties added in the past two years to be restricted to HTTPS. I’m glad about that. I wrote about this announcement at the time:

I am in total agreement that we should be encouraging everyone to switch to HTTPS. But requiring HTTPS in order to use CSS? The ends don’t justify the means.

If there were valid security reasons for making HTTPS a requirement, I would be all for enforcing this. But these are two totally separate areas. Enforcing HTTPS by withholding CSS support is no different to enforcing AMP by withholding search placement.

There’s no official word from the Mozilla Security Blog about any change to their two-year old “effective immediately” policy, and the original blog post hasn’t been updated. Maybe we can all just pretend it never happened.

Don’t quit your day job: the benefits of being a ‘bifurcator’ | Aeon Essays

Here, then, is my speculation. Work is something we struggle to get and strive to keep. We love-hate it (usually not in equal measure). Sometimes it seems meaningless. I’m told this is the case even for surgeons, teachers and disaster-relief workers: those with jobs whose worth seems indisputable. For the mere facilitators, the obscure cogs in the machinery of the modern economy whose precise function and value it takes some effort to ascertain, the meaning in what we do often seems particularly elusive (I should know). I contend, however, that while our lives need to be meaningful, our work does not; it only has to be honest and useful. And if someone is voluntarily paying you to do something, it’s probably useful at least to them.

Drupal’s commitment to accessibility | Dries Buytaert

Shots fired!

I’ve come to believe that accessibility is not something you do for a small group of people. Accessibility is about promoting inclusion. When the product you use daily is accessible, it means that we all get to work with a greater number and a greater variety of colleagues. Accessibility benefits everyone.

Adding value, by adding values – Public Digital

Ben Terrett on balancing the needs of an individual user with the needs of everyone else.

Of course we care about our clients: we want them to be successful and profitable. But we think there’s a balance to be struck between what success means for just the user or customer, and what success means for society.

Thinking in Triplicate – Mule Design Studio – Medium

Erika has written a great guest post on Ev’s blog. It covers the meaning, the impact, and the responsibility of design …and how we’ve been chasing the wrong measurements of success.

We design for the experience of a single user at a time and expect that the collective experience, and the collective impact, will take care of itself.

Cameron has a bone to pick. Why, oh, why, he wonders, are we so quick to create processes when what we really need is a good strong culture?

Strong culture = less process

To stop people breaking stuff: make a process for it. Want to make people act responsibly: make a process for it. Tired of telling people about something? Make a process for it.

For any single scenario you can name it’ll be easier to create a process for it than build a culture that handles it automatically. But each process is a tiny cut away from the freedom that you want your team to enjoy.

I take his point, but I also think that some processes are not only inevitable, but downright positive. There should be a process for handling payroll. There should be a process for handling promotions. Leaving that to culture might sound nice and nimble, but it could also lead to unintentional bias and unfairness.

But let’s leave those kind of operational processes aside and focus on process and culture when it comes to design and engineering. Cameron’s point is well taken here. Surely you want people to just know the way things are done? Surely you want people to just get on with doing the work without putting hurdles in their way?

On the face of it, yes. If you’re trying to scale design at your organisation, then every extra bit of process is going to slow down your progress.

But what if speed isn’t the most important metric of success when it comes to scaling design? You’ve got to make sure you’re scaling the right things.

Mark writes:

This is a post in defence of process. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: ‘urgh, process is a thing put in place to make up for mediocre teams’; or ‘prioritise discussion over documentation’; or ‘I get enough red tape in other parts of my life’.

The example he gives is undeniably a process that will slow things down …deliberately.

Whenever someone asks me to do something that I think seems ill-conceived in some way, I ask them to write it down. That’s it. Because writing is high effort. Making sentences is the easy bit, it’s the thinking I want them to do. By considering their request it slows them down. Maybe 30% of the time or something, they come back and say ‘oh, that thing I asked you to do, I’ve had a think and it’s fine, we don’t need to do it’.

I’ve seen this same tactic employed in standards bodies. Somebody bursts into a group and says “I’ve got a great idea—we should make this a thing!” The response, no matter what the idea is, is to say “Document use-cases.” It’s a stumbling block, and also a bit of a test—if they do come back with use-cases, the idea can be taken seriously; the initial enthusiasm needs to be backed up with hard graft.

(On a personal level, I sometimes use a little trick when it comes to email. If someone sends me a short email that would require a long response from me, I’ll quickly fire back a clarifying question: “Quick question: did you mean X or Y?” Now the ball is back in their court. If they respond swiftly with an answer to my question, then they’ve demonstrated their commitment and I honour their initial request.)

Anyway, it sounds like Cameron is saying that process is bad, and Mark is saying process can be good. Cody Cowan from Postlight thinks they’re both right:

To put it bluntly: people, not process, are the problem.

Even so, he acknowledges Cameron’s concern:

One of the biggest fears that people have about process is that something new is going to disrupt their work, only to be replaced by yet another rule or technique.

I think we can all agree that pointlessly cumbersome processes are bad. The disagreement is about whether all processes are inherently bad, or whether some processes are not only necessary, but sometimes even beneficial.

When Cameron talks about the importance of company culture, he knows whereof he speaks. He’s been part of Canva’s journey from a handful of people to hundreds of people. They’ve managed to scale their (excellent) culture along the way. That’s quite an achievement—scaling culture is really, really challenging. Scaling design is hard. Scaling culture is even harder.

But you know what’s even more challenging than scaling culture? Changing culture.

What if your company didn’t start with a great culture to begin with? What if you’re not Canva? What if you’re not AirBnB? What are your options then?

You can’t create a time travel machine to go back to the founding of the company and ensure a good culture from the outset.

You can’t shut down your existing company and create a new company from scratch, this time with a better culture.

You’ve got to work with what you’ve got. That doesn’t mean you can’t change your company culture, but it’s not going to be easy. Culture is pretty far down the stack of pace layers—it’s slow to change. But you can influence culture by changing something that’s less slow to change. I would argue the perfect medium for this is …process.

Once you know what values you’re trying to embed into your culture, create processes that amplify and reward those values. I totally understand the worry that these processes will reduce autonomy and freedom, but I think that only applies if the company already has a strong culture of autonomy and freedom. If you’re trying to create a culture of autonomy and freedom, then—as counter-intuitive as it may seem—you can start by putting processes in place.

Then, over time, those processes can seep into the day-to-day understanding of how things are done. Process dissolves into culture. It’s a long game to play, but as Cameron points out, that’s the nature of culture change:

Where culture pays off is in the long run. It’s hard work: defining the culture, hiring for the culture and communicating the culture again, and again, and again. But if you want to make a company where people are empowered, passionate, and champions of your organisation then it’s the only path forward.

Leaving Clearleft – Jon Aizlewood

Following on from Ben’s post, this is also giving me the warm fuzzies.

I, in no uncertain terms, have become a better designer thanks to the people I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside at Clearleft. I’ll forever be thankful of my time there, and to the people who helped me become better.