A few weeks ago I received a BuzzFeed newsletter (it’s really great, and I’d recommend that you sign up for it if you haven’t already) that featured a "brand timeline " that had been created by an advertising account executive.  It was surprisingly revealing, and it made me realize that in many instances a brand name or logo alone is enough to conjure up an entire story.

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I’m at the HOW Design Conference in Boston for the first part of this week, thanks to the generous support of my employers, who like to send me on little adventures like this every now and then so that I can keep myself sharp, learn new things that might benefit our company, and (possibly most importantly) not go nuts and kill everyone in the office.

One of the most interesting parts of the HOW Conference is, for me, the opportunity to be around thousands of other designers. Generally speaking when someone says "I’m a designer" there’s a certain expectation of creative ability–the casual observer naturally wants to assign the designer some preternatural ability to ooze creative juices nonstop.

To some extent this is true; I’d certainly expect the folks at a conference of this sort to be the type that are always questioning everything around them and looking at things in new and different ways. But in all honesty, designers can be quite lazy, just as employees in virtually any other field can be (witness highway construction projects wherein one guy is in a hole doing something and seven other guys are standing around said hole, discussing it). And a couple of things that I’ve seen so far from my fellow attendees have dismayed me.

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Over the weekend I submitted my thesis to the Media Studies department at The New School.  Barring any unforeseen circumstances, all that’s left for me to do is to graduate in two weeks.

The past five months’ worth of work have been difficult and challenging, but I’m pleased with the outcome and will be interested to see what comes of this work next.

If you are interested, the entire document (it’s over 140 pages all told, so be forewarned) is available for download.  I hope it’s as interesting for you to read as it was rewarding for me to write.

Download
From Stovetop to Screen: A Cultural History of Food Television

While browsing through the New York Times today I found an article that pointed out something that hadn’t occurred to me (not consciously, anyway)–there is no legal equivalent to medical information sites like WebMD or general knowledge sites like Wikipedia or MSN’s Encarta.  Of course, there are plenty of legal sites out there like FindLaw, but generally they’re difficult to navigate and confusing for non-lawyers to use.  (What’s a tort, anyway? Isn’t that a fruit-filled pastry?)  And sites like LegalZoom and NoLo aren’t designed to be legal references; they’re businesses that want to sell you their products.

The Times article is primarily about a new site called JD Supra, which aims to be a law “library” populated with documents contributed by lawyers of all calibers.  The idea is that Joe Schmo can go to the site, type in a search term, narrow the search by jurisdiction and benefit from what lawyers have had to say about it in various cases.  (The library is a bit sparse at the moment–a search for “tenant rights” in the 2nd Circuit returned exactly zero results.)  There are other sites mentioned as well, including PreCYdent, which aims to be a legal search engine.  The site is currently in beta.

It’s interesting to me that it’s taken so long for the legal world to embrace the Internet and to make it easier for consumers to explore and understand the judicial system and its proceedings, but then again part of me understands that lawyers operate in something of a black box.  Law has its own language and codes and complexities and it takes years to understand it all.  Then again, Americans have always had the right to represent themselves in court–nowhere does it say in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that “you must hire a lawyer whose billable hours cost at least $150, lest you lose your case.”  True, relatively few people choose to take this route since it is difficult to argue with a seasoned lawyer who is gifted with a strong grasp of rhetoric, but the whole point of the Internet is to make information more free and available to everyone.

As a designer that works full-time on a high-traffic website, I understand perfectly that without ample user testing it’s impossible to know exactly how users will interact with your designs. I’ve watched agape when, in testing sessions, users seem unable to decode new features that I’ve developed that made perfect sense to me.

What’s even more baffling to me is when users sometimes disregard simple instructions altogether, especially when they’re clearly presented. I can’t quite grasp why someone would ask someone else for help or give up entirely instead of simply reading the directions. There’s probably a psychological component in play but I’m not a psychologist so I’m uncertain to what that principle is called (if it has a name).

It would be ignorant to try to apply a one-size-fits-all explanation to why users seem to have problems with various interfaces, especially on the Internet. But user error is something you can count on with virtually any technology, even with devices as old as the telephone. Not cell phones, not wireless phones–the old-fashioned telephone that plugs into the wall.

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