The Daily Report
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Measure Customer Time, Not Organization Time: Gerry McGovern
We need to manage speed on the page, not just the speed of the page load. Manage the customer’s time on task. We won’t become customer-centric until we change our metrics—focusing on customers’ time to…
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Private Parts: unlikely advocate fights for online privacy, anonymity
MESMERIZED as we have been by the spectacle of the flaming garbage scow of U.S. election news, it would have been easy to miss this other narrative. But in the past few days, just as…
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News of the World
OUR UBER DRIVER must be hard of hearing, because he plays his right-wing talk radio morning show LOUD. It’s not your erudite, intellectual morning show. It’s hosted by Morning Zoo-type personalities: braying, hyper-testicular fellows, as…
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Spotify to music subscribers: drop dead
Since at least 2010, subscribers to Spotify’s paid music service have asked the company to include the ability to sort playlists alphabetically in the desktop player. It’s the sort of drop-dead obvious feature that should…
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Ten Years Ago on the Web
2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugs, worrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the time. Pundits were claiming bad design was good for the web…
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Speaking Most Clearly When Not Speaking At All
Writing brain and speaking brain verbalize differently for me, I have found. I’m considered a passable conference speaker, and, from friendly conversations to client meetings, I’m rarely at a loss for words. But the ideas…
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Sometimes a cigar is a penis
MANY NIGHTS I have these dreams where I lose my daughter while traveling. We’re about to board a flight, and suddenly she has vanished. In other parts of these same dreams, still traveling, I’m doing…
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Help Carolyn Wood
ONE OF THE NICEST web professionals I’ve ever worked with desperately needs and deserves our community’s help, compassion, and kindness. Many of you, whether you knew it or not, have benefited from Carolyn Wood’s work…
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Introducing studio.zeldman
studio.zeldman is open for business. It’s a vision I’ve been cooking up, a new studio supported by some of the most talented people in our industry and everything I’ve learned in two-plus decades of web…
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Has Design Become Too Hard? – transcription
What follows is a transcription of Has Design Become Too Hard?, which I wrote for Communication Arts in June 2016. I transcribe it here against the day CA takes down its content. WE DESIGNERS love…
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Instagram to third-party developers: drop dead
I’M pretty much done with Instagram. I never loved it, but it’s where most of my friends looked for my photos, so I made peace with it as a platform—and continued to use poor, old,…
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Has Design Become Too Hard? | Jeffrey Zeldman in Communication Arts
Digital design is not what it used to be, we say. The fun has gone out of it. An endless deluge of frameworks and technologies has leached the creativity out of what we make and…
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Position Wanted: Front-End Director
WE have creative directors and design directors, but we don’t seem to have any front-end directors. And maybe we should. For years at big companies, people in different silos have written CSS with no information…
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90 Minutes With Amtrak.com
I’m traveling by train next week. This morning, Amtrak .com wouldn’t let me log into my account with my password, which I have never changed, and which Amtrak.com now says is “incorrect.” When I eventually…
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Breakfast Links
The finest linkage this week for web and interaction designers and developers.