2. The Apple iPhone’s default software typeface is Helvetica.

3. The Apple iPhone is pretty much unslayable. It won’t matter what other touchscreen-based mobile network interfaces are developed and how much more feature-rich they are and on what networks they run, the iPhone will still be more desirable. I do not proffer an image of one because you, my reader, should know how it looks. It is one of the rare instances of a first-mover dominating a market space, and it’s a first-mover in a hardware interface, no less.

4. Why does the Eames Lounge Chair hold its resale value so well compared to practically every other lounge chair in existence? Of all the thousands designed, there are numerous more comfortable, more visually daring, more exotic in their use of materials. Despite this, the Eames still commands a premium.

5. The choice of Helvetica as the iPhone’s software typeface was a strategy to position the device not merely as the next step in a technological progression — the Motorola RAZR and StarTAC phones were groundbreaking but their cultural value was only set within the context of other mobile phones — but as the next milestone of the modernist tradition.

And in case you were wondering, yes, this has been a long week.

In the space of the last several weeks gliding recklessly above the clouds, papers and case studies and Movable Type templates disconnected from the earth, it was tempting to call that dinner a reprieve or a distraction. But these experiences are also indispensable for perspective, the necessary context for independent professionals toiling, certainly underappreciated and often alone, in a nigh boundless profession. That night, it was free range time (I once knew it as free-association hour), and while it lacked the structure and rigor of the workplace or the seminar, to deem it a euphemism for loafing is naïve and disrespectful of the range of thought and power of metaphors. In that alighting with a plate of Szechuan beef and three colleagues, with the yawning chasm between the day’s labor and my professional pursuits in full view, I remembered the relevance of these lofted abstractions, remembered why the work is worth it.

(I should note the word interdisciplinary peppered this conversation with unsurprising frequency.)

• House Works on a Bailout — for E-Mail
  New York Times (includes a small screen cap of my work)
• House of Representatives’ Web site overwhelmed
  CNN (#1 most viewed story earlier today)
• The Day After: House E-Mail Servers Flooded with Millions of Voter E-Mails
  Dallas Morning News
• House Website Crumbles Under Weight of $700 Billion Bailout
  Wired (includes screen cap)
• Bailout Bill Overwhelms House Internet Servers
  ABC News
• U.S. House limits incoming e-mail
  Detroit Free Press
• Ailing US House website limps back to life
  Agence France-Presse
• House Deals With Unprecedented Website Troubles
  CBS News (via Politico)
• House Web site overwhelmed as bailout bill fails
  AP
• Public reaction to bailout failure jams Internet in D.C.
  The Tennessean (featuring the tragically comic “Once on the Web site, locate contact forms and phone numbers. If it doesn’t work, keep trying.“)
• U.S. House Puts Limit On Constituent Emails
  DigitalJournal.com
• House limits constituent e-mails to prevent crash
  The Hill
• House websites slowed by e-mails on bailout bill
  The Hill

And then there’s the blogosphere’s take on it.

Also, I should note that I was on the outside of this decision and that the people who made it are a group that includes my direct supervisors and others vastly above my pay grade. My contribution was actually just making that page where the error message now resides.

And I don’t agree with it at all, not when reducing the number of requests was really what would bring the situation under control, and the simplest way to do that would be to just surface the most sought-after content on the home page, including a complete directory of all representatives. Let me repeat and italicize that seemingly revolutionary idea: surface the most sought-after content on the home page, including a complete directory of all representatives. This is what I advocated for years. And anybody with an eye on the trends – search logs, web stats, etc. – and a long enough memory to recall the drop of the 9/11 Commission report PDF and the Mark Foley resignation (which brought down the Clerk’s site with hourly spikes two years ago, to the day) would’ve seen this coming as early as Thursday. Where the asinine triage command originated I can’t identify. It’s just unfortunate that constituents hoping to contact their representatives in earnest are the group most adversely affected (to say nothing of the group in the Infrastructure branch monitoring the servers, the legislative correspondents under the deluge, and anybody else freaking out about the arbitrary path the American government has chosen to remedy massive failures in private enterprises).

I sent over to Lou a copy of the top 20 search queries from Sunday, 28 September, and he’s posted it to the Search Analytics blog at Rosenfeld Media. I intend to follow through with this research (off the top of my head: “bailout” was the top query starting on 23 September, “Barney Frank,” “email,” and “contact” each cracked the top ten in days preceding), not that it’ll make a dint of change in my employers’ minds. It’s just nice to know, as time passes, as I’m now well into my fourth year of employment, that I haven’t lost my ability to think beyond what this job requires – rote production of kilobytes of rhetorical fluff – and about what this situation requires.

I wonder what legislative change, if any, this will prompt. Granted the House has pressing issues on the floor but this is just embarrassing. Can the paradigm with which lawmakers have approached the World Wide Web – mid-’90s stamp of technology adopted for its own sake – be shifted into something more appropriately modern by passing a law? That remains to be determined, although I’d like to help write that legislation, if only to actually guide and assist instead of just saying “I told you so” years after the fact. Not that it isn’t fun to say.

I told you so.

Design is inherently a practice of problem solving, and the problem was that in a brawl of brutes, Kristy, Patrick, and I would not be favored against these two. (How many pitchers of Coors would I have to imbibe over how many decades to be at once that intimidating and pathetic? There’s a Fermi problem for you.) But designers never solve problems in vacuums (unless you’re James Dyson, but I digress). Our solutions must always follow contextual parameters, and if you’re resourceful, in those parameters lie the keys to those solutions.

I immediately surveyed the room for a pool table — none. No pool cues or balls. Cues can make clumsy weapons, but they’re effective for creating a defensive radius while employing a projectile offense. In any case, no need bring out the amphibious invasion strategy guide for a landlocked country.

Liquor bottles can be dangerous either as projectiles — they’re heavy enough to have a predictable trajectory — or lacerating weapons — though there’s a high likelihood of injuring oneself as well as an opponent if employing a bottle as a breakaway club. I wanted to harness a beer tap — solid wood and built to grip. It would be the closest thing to a Major League Baseball bat readily available. Patrick mused that one could brand an opponent’s face with the etched-metal Magic Hat #9 tap.

Kristy and I were working on wine, but Patrick had beer served in an acrylic pitcher and glass mug. Hold the bowl of the mug inside the fist (loosely so it won’t shatter) with the thick glass handle facing outward — aim for the teeth. With a hand wrapped in cloth napkins and holding the acrylic pitcher, one of us could distract with a splash of beer and follow it with devastating plastic battery. Aim for the neck.

The tchotchkes on the walls, the contents of the speed rack, lonely drinkers in dubious football jerseys, failing pickup artists, girls-night-out girls, bartenders and bouncers — all contextual parameters, all potentially problematic and indispensable to the solution. There was no way to consider all the possible outcomes and iterations and the half-price cabernet wasn’t a boon to scenario planning. Besides, I tend to favor diplomacy: solve the problem by negating its existence.

But Patrick and I agreed: we’d both, inexplicably, wanted to be party to a bar fight. These two guys with their asinine burger orders (just say ‘medium well,’ no need to explain the physical properties of charcoal) and jingoistic politics who’ve probably been in bar fights before have won some and lost some and lived to tell. Maybe they go out looking for a fight; maybe bad beer does that to a man.

For me, for as much as being a designer requires a thorough understanding of context, often in the form of immersion, it is also characterized by a kind of academic remove. It’s just research, just business. And so often, I just negotiate, compromise, move on to the next job. But one day soon, I’ll skip that diplomacy stage and just solve a problem in the thick of it — wield a beer tap, maybe kick some ass, maybe take a beer mug to the teeth. Because bar fights, day jobs, love — it’s all in the context. And soon, I’ll knock ‘em all out.

Packaging, no matter how sleek, is ultimately disposable, and laptop users who pay the premium for a portable computer already consider the investment of an additional piece of luggage that’ll keep it safe from office to home, subway to sidewalk, journey to destination (and that piece of luggage will have its own packaging, to be sure). The packaging and the messenger bag serve the same purpose for manufacturers and end-users respectively — to protect the computer from damage in transit — so if one designs a unit that serves both audiences, it’s that much less raw material consumed in the process.

And marketers also score a victory, a substantial one at that. It gives them more leverage because the product packaging, if used as intended, continues to promote the brand even after the owner calls it a day at the coffee shop. I find the prominent logo displayed on the bag problematic since it easily identifies it as the container of a computer, increasing its likelihood of being stolen and bordering on conspicuous consumption. I understand the compromise from a marketing perspective, but I advocate taking a more stealthy approach — one that HP has actually done with some success with its “The computer is personal again” campaign that shrewdly excluded celebrities’ faces from their endorsements. Screw the logo, let’s see business-class models shipped out in carbon-fiber or aniline leathers, student editions wrapped in cotton duck and wool felt, and of course, limited-edition collaborations — imagine Halliburton Zero × Lenovo ThinkPad and Mulberry × MacBook Air (Coach × Dell seems sadly inevitable) — stamped by the starchitect du jour, touted on NotCot, destined for eBay.

I expect the trend will continue, and though the HP Pavilion dv6929 in its aquarium-printed sling may ultimately be a middling computer in an obvious container, its precedent will hopefully (and I think likely) be followed in more sophisticated execution. Well, it better be, or else I’m going to end up with a bunch of crappy looking bags sitting around my apartment from computers through the years, given that’s the form computers continue to assume.

There were my brown years, the days I resembled UPS livery. And overlapping that time in my work were the purple days (months, rather, just after the oranges), which yielded lilacs and aubergines and ubes and all shades between. Not that any of this work was published as intended, because unfortunately, the stigmas associated with the hue outweighed in the eyes of clients what I felt was its singular grandeur. Because I never considered colors property, I never thought that gays or monarchs exclusively claimed purple, and damn those (lots of people) who thought otherwise. My own interpretation of it — assertive as cardinal without the abrasiveness, cool as cobalt without the inertness — is what I ascribe to its users, and more specifically, wearers.

And soon, they’ll be everywhere. There is a fourth thing about the sign, that the wearer has considered all of this and then embarked on finding it in their size and clearly didn’t give up as seasons passed and it still didn’t materialize. And this could be that season when it does, trendy as it may be. But as seasons pass, there’ll be other colors and so many aubergine overcoats will remain closeted and the status quo will re-emerge, and those just-so strange souls will make themselves known, on bicycles, cigarette in hand, as dry ochre foliage rains around us.

And in the meantime, I suppose it’s as good a time as any to introduce myself to strange women.

The most disarming thing to hear after ordering a mojito may be the five-word question for here or to go?

I’m back from An Event Apart New Orleans and after a good night’s sleep, much like Chicago before it, I am not only prepared to be a better web designer but inspired to be a better person. It’s time to move on from this is something worth thinking about to this is how to improve the world.

From my visit with Ky Vinh last year came the recommendation to practice French in Montréal, though the temptation of fluid conversation in English proved overwhelming. I watched Cinema Paradiso at the end of the World Film Festival, tracing its weft and weave from college courses in Italian, my recent familiarity with a French phrasebook, and visual cues — following enough to make me want to understand it now. Sean recounted his screening of Babel in Poland without English subtitles for a section of the narrative in Japanese sign language. And while Star Wars III: Backstroke of the West is the stuff of legend, I personally had the surreal experience of watching “King of the Hill” dubbed en français.

In Chicago, I met Santiago from the University of Minnesota when he ordered a Boddingtons, and we discussed our respective months in the nations of our ethnicity — for him, Madrid. I asked him to advise me a course of activities from the perspective of a Madrileño, and he noted how bullfighting and flamenco as activities of upper-class Spaniards had gypsy origins. We discussed the beauty of Barcelona, the Catalan language barrier and how it stunted his exploration of the place. He had been working with the education-abroad program on campus and had been struggling to quantify travelling’s value in business. I told him: being in a place where one’s language is useless forces one to rely on context to exist and broad, universal gestures to communicate. These experiences where one is forced to rely on fundamental design principles — color paradigms, pictograms, and the like — not only underscore their importance but, and perhaps this is more important, endow one with a unique empathy for the people who rely solely on their consistent implementation for survival.

The father-and-son proprietors of Botines are Catalan. Sean’s description coincides completely with my opinion of the place, so I’ll simply quote it here: “the amazing curiosity/junk shop on St-Laurent, north of Mont-Royal. This is one of the most amazing stores in the world (and ridiculously cheap). I don’t remember what it’s called, or EXACTLY where it is, but if you walk north from Mont Royal on the east side of the road, you’ll come to it in a few minutes. There’ll be some lame stuff outside – bicycle helmets, used books, but STEP IN.” They speak Catalan to each other and communicate with customers in French and English, and they moved to Montreal when the son was one year old.

Over dinner conversation last night, someone else at the table had taken meetings at a Korean company that were simultaneously translated, and he marveled at the translators’ ability to receive one language as input and instantly produce another language — words, inflections, gestures — as output. He noted that once the translators understood the jargon they were repeating, they may very well have been able to add to the discussion in their own right.

The relationship between nationalism and language is a strange beast to me, partially because I hardly feel a sense of belonging anywhere my midland American accent is inconspicuous (and often enjoy places where it is scorned), but mostly because my professional calling has forced me to inhabit a staggering degree of nations. I’ve worked almost entirely in the United States, but producing work for musicians, artists, merchants, universities, and politicians has required me to learn their jargon, to trace the weft and weave of each profession, and pay attention to context. I picked up The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana at Indigo on Sainte-Catherine while looking for postcards, and the plot of it seems appropriate for the situation where I now find myself: an antiquarian book dealer loses his memory and the plot of the novel concerns its reconstruction from childhood onward, reliving the protagonist’s youth as a series of illustrated books, dusty encyclopedias, and pop songs and Fascist anthems on Tuscan radio. Regarding memory, I have the opposite problem, but I’m beginning to realize how my identity now is a sum of cultural experiences and the language I speak is its consequence.

By the way, I am firmly in the Saint-Viateur camp as far as bagels are concerned. Their sesame bagel is possibly the best food value in all of North America — I would love to pit its minimalist greatness against the myriad zings of a King Taco carnitas burrito that entertain the tastebuds. I can’t relive my 19-year-old existence with my 24-year-old knowledge, but it’s possibly more fun to revisit that reckless existence knowing I can afford the cuisine.

In other news, hardly two weeks passed that I was back in Washington — my Chicago trip was just three weeks ago and I’m currently reporting from San Francisco (well, Milpitas, but I was there earlier today and am returning tomorrow), and with not-one-but-two round-trips to Los Angeles in pre-production, a New York daytrip the week after next, and a day in-transit to Manila early 2008, it’s tempting to measure my life in boarding passes, foreign currencies, and postcards sent. And though it’s my spoken ambition to calibrate my existence to the basic unit of a transcontinental flight, my worst-kept secret is that I’d like to land somewhere and know, quietly, sincerely, that I’ll be understood.

• Most of the 970 results are found returned from the Energy and Commerce Committee’s website from the 107th Congress (2001-2002). Their webmaster at the time ([my current supervisor]) said he did nothing to optimize the site’s pages for the House search engine. Generally speaking, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to how the algorithm determines relevance.
• Queries are, in fact, case-sensitive. “Nancy Pelosi” and “nancy pelosi” produce different quantities of results, but the most “relevant” of each query are nearly identical. Commonly used search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) are not case-sensitive.
• Queries for singular and plural nouns are identical. “committee” and “committees” produce the exact same results.
• The Pell Grant Underfunding PDF by the Oversight Committee that appears in the top-ten results of most state searches deserves further scrutiny. How this managed to be considered more relevant than any member-generated page in Colorado, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas is worth determining.
• Pages and documents produced by Energy and Commerce, Foreign Affairs, and Ways and Means Committees form a clear plurality of all results. I can proffer no explanation.
• There is no apparent weight given to the title of a document. Untitled documents are not subdued in the results.
• The search engine’s inability to discern titles of non-HTML documents (PDFs, MS Office docs, etc.) is a glaring drawback. In a screen reader’s links mode, “No Title Provided for This Document” is a sadistic running joke, a more verbose take on the “click here” gag.
• The decision to keep House leadership links off the home page of House.gov last year was made in insipience (not mine, thank you). Ten of the tested queries are for House leadership; six are variations on Nancy Pelosi or Speaker of the House, and two of those are among the top-ten most frequent queries. None of the top-ten results for any leadership queries is a page from any leadership site.
• I haven’t determined the criteria and percentage yet, but my generous estimate is that 15% of the results are at least relevant in the way that someone who can only write their own name is literate. The number of first-results that are relevant is less than the number of successful Apollo moon landings.
• I have not yet codified “valuable” as opposed to “relevant” search results, but we know them when we see them. Of the 97 queries, only two produced a valuable first-result.
• An enterprise search engine should provide reporting of this nature automatically, regularly, and with much more robust data (like click-through rates for different results, detailed session data, etc.). The existing search engine does not provide this kind of reporting, and without this information, it diminishes our ability to make sound information architecture decisions. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson: it is not only dull itself, it is the cause of dullness in others.

What I expected to encounter was a way to address customer complaints through improved metadata and other SEO techniques to compensate for a search engine that doesn’t dig deeply enough. What I discovered is that the current search engine doesn’t merely produce worthless results: it willfully and flagrantly leads site visitors astray. A piquant example of the insurmountable distance between visitors’ expectations and this engine’s results is that a search for ‘contact’ — the 14th most frequent query, and of the 97, the one with the most results (157,508) — yields not an overall House directory (which doesn’t exist) or any contact information of any kind for any House office in the first 25 results. Instead, the first 25 results feature testimony by staff of 1-800-CONTACTS from a 2002 Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, PDFs from the Foreign Affairs Committee (whoever ‘Dianne’ is should be determined and she should be consulted since she apparently also knows the secret to breaking into the top search results), and the 9/11 Commission report at #24.

I believe that this wisp of foul data not only crystallizes the argument to replace the existing search engine but that ceasing its use immediately — removing search from House.gov until a replacement is implemented — is an improvement and deserves serious consideration. Providing a search form is an affordance of goodwill and a best practice; attaching that form to this search engine is not merely indifferent but malicious. How this search engine was ever considered good enough for government work is an enigma, but that a half-decade of consideration has passed on how best to end its miserable existence is contemptible.

If my candor seems excessive, I recommend attempting the same 97 searches I performed; the mounting frustration from each scatalogically defective set of results all but led to a 98th search for a long drink and a short firearm. That site visitors give up on House.gov after one search is my hope. My recommendation is to spare them the experience.

This analysis is an early stage in a planned report of information architecture recommendations for House.gov and Member sites — I intend to parse this data further and research site traffic patterns to draw more conclusions and detailed recommendations. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to your feedback. Thanks for reading.

The preceding email was sent at 02:39 -0400 to all Web Solutions staff.

Notes on An Event Apart, Chicago 2007.

“Dealing With The Both of You” by Jim Coudal was, depending on one’s ability to extrapolate useful information from sots and blood from rocks, either the total summation of An Event Apart or a phenomenally absurd rant. Local bar as “conference room B”? I get it, but this is not practical advice for people in conservative corporate environments who still are compelled to work creatively in order to support their families. Who in this context would seriously leave the office mid-day for a shot and a brew, even under the ægis of sparking productivity? Imagine this exchange:

“Honey, what’s the fifty-dollar charge at Neighborhood Pub on the 18th of last month?”
“That? I had a few beers because I needed inspiration.”

And I like I needed inspiration as a riposte for when the designer’s significant other leaves the designer’s unemployed verging-on-alcoholic ass for someone else.

Nevertheless, what I feel should have been expanded upon was that concept of eavesdropping, the idea that design is inherently social and (oh, this would’ve been an appropriate segue from Zeldman’s talk) while we all may not (want to) be drinkers and chain-smokers, we can still — even with families or uptight colleagues in tow — engage strangers and the unsuspecting public in developing our understanding of the social context in which our work will exist. And given that, the fact that I gained more from the individual seminars than the open bar in between its two days is a testament to the quality of the conference as a whole.

The two seminars that engaged me most were delivered by the two speakers about whom I knew the least — Lou Rosenfeld and Luke Wroblewski — rich in case studies and delving into facets of the field where there sadly isn’t much in the way of common sense, and completely applicable to present and future career development. I would have gladly alloted the latter presentation another half-hour or more (Luke unfortunately hastened his discussion of selection dependent inputs to not exceed his hour).

At the end of Lou’s presentation on Monday, I cornered him in the lobby outside the ballroom to discuss the application of his presentation in my workplace and the possibility of consulting my colleagues. When I revealed my employer to him, the discussion moved towards the state of information architecture on federal government websites — as we headed back into the ballroom at the end of the break, after he asked how long I’d been proverbially mining salt, he followed up with (and I paraphrase) “do you look forward to work when you wake up in the morning?” My incremental implementation of web standards and advocacy of accessibility and usability probably counteracts the few occasions I’m compelled to act immorally, and he agreed with me when I acknowledged that the impression these positive changes leaves in my present circumstance, however light, is made indelible in a way no other employer will likely match.

The rest of the conference had its highlights: the ethics of AJAX (Jeremy Keith), keyboard-navigable Google Maps (Derek Featherstone), and Dan, I believe in microformats now — time to get myself properly on XFN and cobble together a favicon for this place. In the company of a younger cachet of attendees (and presenters) at the Billy Goat Tavern, double cheeseburgers by the half-dozen. Derek also provided the oh shit jawdropper of the moment — before you click through, ask yourself the question: how does one semantically structure a crossword puzzle in HTML?

Chicago, as a city, is a fascinating read — I skimmed it briefly on a Sunday afternoon river tour — with all the tropes of American industrial cities for the last half century (including a present obsession with condominiums), colored by the permanent yet malleable memory carried by the survival of a tragic fire in childhood. I had a killer view of its outline from my 42nd-floor hotel room (your tax dollars hard at work) — it feels at once singular and indistinguishable, a Mies van der Rohe wet dream, like New York without the self-parody, like Washington without the dysfunctional grid.

I plan to return to there, to feel out more of the city than Wrigley Field (Cubs won), the Blue Line, and the bar crawl at O’Hare (actually, my flight today connects there), and I may have outgrown hostels for the B&B circuit.

Apropos nothing, when’s the last time you encountered Amish people at an airport?At any rate, my next travelogue will recap my coming time to Montreal (22 and 8, for those of you keeping score). Au Pied du Cochon, Librissime, Cluny ArtBar — good signs it will join Cambridge on The List. And three days of Chicago, two of An Event Apart — though they are but fingerprints on the surface of memory, that may be as much of an impression one may need to leave to be remembered forever.