2010 was a year that included more meetings than I ever could have imagined. Many lacked clear agendas, required far too many participants to be productive or were simply directionless and resulted in countless hours of lost productivity and much head scratching, and so Jason Fried’s TED Talk on interruptions and productivity is timely and echos most of my feelings about being at the office.
A significant issue Fried doesn’t address directly is the problem of context shifting. For example — you’re interrupted at work while head down on a tough problem by a co-worker who has a question about another unrelated project. Like opening a computer program, it requires you to clear the first project information from memory (or push it aside) and load everything you know about the second one, even if it’s only for a minute. Try doing that a few times a day and your head will be spinning. It may already be. But it happens all the time and ties directly into why people are often mentally exhausted at the end of the day, don’t feel like they accomplished much, or worse yet, might be on the road to burning out.
Let’s be honest — over the last several years, there’s been more than a metric tonne of website and web interface design flaunted by “designers” (finger quote emphasis mine) that has been little more than pixel for pixel copies of the creative work and aesthetic that’s originated out of Cupertino. Does it actually count as original? Is it appropriate? Is there real strategy or conceptual thinking to stand behind it? Is it really that interesting — that a designer took someone else’s “style” and painted it on a layout?
I think Warren Buffet’s comments about imitators (via Liz Danzico) gets to the heart of the issue — that like spec work, it undermines the efforts of serious practitioners.
…there’s a “natural progression” to how good new ideas go badly wrong. He called this progression the “three Is.” First come the innovators, who see opportunities that others don’t and champion new ideas that create genuine value. Then come the imitators, who copy what the innovators have done. Sometimes they improve on the original idea, often they tarnish it. Last come the idiots, whose avarice undermines the very innovations they are trying to exploit. (20:45)
Perhaps it’s just perception or that I’m getting old and crotchety but the sheer amount of attention “shiny” gets over actual substance in the web world is disheartening. What happened to original thought? If someone else’s “style” is your secret sauce, you’ve failed, and your clients’ goals may not be far behind.
Yesterday I finished up some work on a little pet project I started via the day job back in December ‘10 just before the holidays. Apple had recently released iAd Producer and after spending a bit of time tinkering with it, I thought it would be a fun little project (read: distraction), but potentially useful down the line for myself or others, to produce a set of wireframe objects based on the iAd platform and some of the default widgets and templates included in the iAd Producer software to make designing iAds — from an experience point of view, just a little bit easier.
Preview of the iAd Wireframe stencils for OmniGraffle
The stencils/templates come in two flavours currently — either OmniGraffle and Adobe Illustrator for your wireframing and experience planning pleasure.
If you find them useful, I’d love to know. Same goes for any improvement suggestions, additional elements worth including, etc. For example, is it worth creating a complementary iPad-sized version of these now that iAds have started to be opened up on that platform as well?
