Book Club 02: Design of Everyday Things

[this transcript has been edited for clarity]

Jacob:

Hi Jeff. Welcome to another episode of the Human Friend Digital Podcast.

Jeff:

Hi Jacob. We’re doing installment number two of our book club series, and this time we read the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.

Jacob:

Yes, this was Jeff’s pick and Jeff has been asking to do this book for, oh, almost eight months, probably off and on. And I finally was like “Oh, okay. I’ll do it.”

Jeff:

Well, not necessarily for the podcast. I just thought you’d find it interesting. And then when we decided to do the book club, I was like, oh, I have the perfect book that I’ve been wanting you to read for a year.

Jacob:

Yes, you’ve been mentioning it forever, but I wanna open it up to some initial impressions. You’ve read it previously.

Jeff:

Yeah. I read it like 10 years ago, maybe.

Jacob:

I wanna say: deeply insightful book. However—very dry in some parts to get through.

Jeff:

I reread it for the second time. I remember the first time I loved it, but I think I was so just enamored with the concepts in the book and how just like, oh my God, these, he’s so right. Like this is how people work in the world. That I wasn’t really paying attention to how boring a lot of it is. Because this time around, I was like, since I already knew all the stuff he was talking about, it’s like “This is your example.” This is boring.

Jacob:

Yeah, I have to agree. A joke that I was saying with my wife and with you before the pod, and it’s true, I feel like this book doesn’t take into consideration that it is a book that needs to be designed into a layout.

Jeff:

Yeah.

Jacob:

It feels very much like a college textbook, but it meanders through its examples in a coherent, yet not as engaging way as it possibly could, and it doesn’t follow, which I think is so funny. It talks about all this human-centered design and activity design. But when you, if you do get into that for writing and copywriting, the biggest things in that is short sections so you can build pace, creating a slippery slope of a narrative so it builds on itself and you’re interested to learn into the next thing a little bit more.

Because what’s funny with him is that he would throw out something that would say like, “here’s something that we’ll talk about up ahead” in the first chapters, which kept the pace up. But when you get later in the book, he starts referencing things that were behind in another chapter where he’s talking about it, be like “more on that back there”. And I’m like, you literally just did the equivalent of throwing an anchor into the conversation to be like “Maybe I should go back.”

Jeff:

Right. Yeah. I wonder if he wrote it, not intending it to be just like read straight through, but more as like a reference manual where he’d be like flipping back and forth. But as, as like, yeah, it’s not obviously, I mean, it’s not fiction, it’s not narrative driven, but like it doesn’t have that flow to it at all.

Jacob:

Yes. And I wanna say, now that I’ve gotten my negativity off my chest…

Jeff:

Yes.

Jacob:

The book was a very insightful book. There’s no doubt in my mind that it was, it is a successful book. Not because he just says it’s, you know, successful, which he does in the book from time to time, which I think is a little cute after a while to be like, okay, I know you said it made it 25 years and it’s gonna make it another 25. Good for you, buddy. But the…

Jeff:

We’re all proud of you, Don.

Jacob:

But the proof is in the pudding. You know, I mean, it is a very good insightful book. The way that he talks about topics, and I wanna talk about some of these too. Affordances, signifiers, mapping, human-centered design, and all this stuff. Holy cow. I mean—yeah, this book does need to be required reading. If you are going to make a thing in the world, whether it’s a website or a product. It’s so helpful.

But you should, you know, I would, if you’re an audio book person, it was really hard to get through because his chapters are like two hours long, some of them.

Jeff:

Yeah. Seven chapters of like a 300 page book. So it’s, yeah. Each chapter is a fair bit of change.

Jacob:

So, negative points aside, format points aside, let’s dive into the thing someone might actually wanna listen to on this podcast.

How DoET fits into web design

Jeff:

So yes, let’s talk about, so you design things Jacob, but not products. You design websites. I’m wondering how you felt, you know, the concepts in the book, like you were mentioning, signifiers, affordances. Like now that you’ve read the book and have the, that vocabulary, do you feel like you’ve used those strategies in designing a website, or do you think that some of them are really only applicable to a physical product?

Jacob:

No, they’re very applicable in the digital space and I think, personally, I didn’t even know what the words I should be using for a lot of that stuff. Signifiers was a really important one to me. A lot of websites, you know, inherently have affordances, like you will be able to read these things, you will be able to see these visuals. And hopefully some of the visuals would be delightful and an affordance might be you can fill out a form. Great.

Now basically since the default of website experiences is a presentation, really it comes down to really good signifiers to show you what’s there and lockouts to make sure that you aren’t doing things wrong or having good notifications that appear. And I didn’t even know I was doing these, but to a certain degree I felt like I was doing them a little poorly or by accident. Like I was just like, I’m a person and I want this to be easy for me to use. So I think we should have a button here and the button should say this.

What I’m learning though from the book is to not only have these signifiers say like what they are for like a button to learn, but like maybe there should be better mapping to different areas of the site. Well, mapping’s probably not the right word. These are all mappings, like these little buttons that you…

Jeff:

Right. Sure, sure, sure.

Jacob:

But signifiers to the type of information. So we are doing a wireframe right now for a local business and they have a lot of educational needs. And while I was reading the book, I had this like section of a site where I had these three buttons that you could do. You could go and start buying their product or you can learn more. And it was a part of these information panels to engage locally.

And I was like, oh, what the user won’t understand if I put buttons and text there is the significance between button A, which is a sales button and button B and C, which are informational buttons. So I was like, well, we should use a signifier around that that works on history. So a lowercase italic “i” typically means information. So I thought, well, we should wrap that box in a little color thing that looks different. We can use one of their brand colors to be an information color. Okay. So we can start helping to create an ecosystem of information for them, and then put a little “i” symbol around that box with those buttons so that you would see the first one would be clearly like, oh, I’m gonna buy something and the second two are, now clearly you’re gonna learn something. So just thinking about approaches like that were really helpful to me.

But I would say a lot of the things in the book as we went on were very physical and market based. So, you know, not everything is perfectly applicable to a website, but I think by and large it is a thing that we have to interact with. And it’s good to keep in mind as I develop more and more complicated websites, such as working on e-commerce or working with a platform that might need multi-language or…

Jeff:

Multicultural. My favorite parts of the book, both times that I went through it were the like, you know, different cultural interpretations of the same thing. Like, you know, the Aborigines of Australia, how they would line up a series of events if you gave them photos of, you know, someone like pouring milk or something and ask them to put them in order of action. They would do it based on east to west and sort of whatever way they were oriented. So if they were facing east, they would put them out in front of them. If they were facing south, you know, they’d put them one way and north the other. That sort of stuff’s so fascinating to me. That’s a really extreme example, but it was like “So cool.”

Jacob:

No, I thought that was one of my favorite ones in the book too. I really thought that was so interesting. And it’s really good to think about, and he talks about this a lot with like keyboards or phones or things that were like legacy constraints that everyone just accepts is like, this is how it is. But moving that from culture to culture too. And it’d be really interesting if I ever get an opportunity to do more international work. Like how would I change certain aspects of the site?

I mean, a lot of the ways websites are now, like it’s hard to break that mold and that creates really difficult challenges for people. And you know, if you move from culture to culture that a website wouldn’t probably translate well from one group to another group or products like that, which I think is interesting.

But one thing that sticks out in my head when he is talking about the QWERTY keyboard a lot or this kind of like the ordering of things like we are a left to right, top to bottom, left to right. So my logo is always in my top left. My last thing I want people to do on the site is always in the top right of the nav.

Jeff:

Right.

Jacob:

And usually what happens is that people, when they complain about websites, it’s usually when they do something really radical up there or it’s in a weird spot that doesn’t make sense, like it’s on the bottom of a site and then people are like, I don’t know. This doesn’t, I don’t know what to do on this site now.

Jeff:

So I wonder now that you’re saying that because internet development is so new and it’s been alive for such a little amount of time, I wonder if there is all that much variation from culture to culture? Because you know, everyone’s using the same Google, but then that made me think, well, is Google oriented the other way in like Arabic countries? Because they write the other way. So I could test that with my VPN and you were asking me the other day why I have a VPN. Well, I can do that.

Jacob:

Yeah, I would like to see, I would like to see like, pretend you’re in Saudi Arabia and Google something. It would be interesting to see the design differences. I have a feeling that website nav, the way that we have it now, is the equivalent of the QWERTY keyboard. We’re not gonna get rid of that.

Jeff:

So do you know how the QWERTY keyboard came to be?

Jacob:

Yes, he explains it quite well in the book. He does. The whole thing about how Remington Rand, there were so many typewriter companies that failed in the 1800s. And Remington Rand came out with the QWERTY keyboard at a time period when everyone was trying different types of keyboard layouts. But this one caused the least amount of jams.

Jeff:

Because it’s slow.

Jacob:

Yes, it is slow and it puts pairings on opposite sides, common pairings on opposite sides of the keyboard, which I was looking at my keyboard going…

Jeff:

That’s why it’s so hard to type with one hand.

Jacob:

Yes, because you have to go all the way across.

Jeff:

Yeah. So that’s a, yeah, that’s a legacy that’ll never change. Even though with modern keyboards, it doesn’t matter anymore. We could have a super efficient keyboard layout and be able to type with one hand, and it wouldn’t cause jams because those don’t exist. It’s like that’ll never change.

Jacob:

Yeah.

Design Sins

Jacob:

So, but let’s get into some of the fun parts that I’ve been waiting for on this podcast, Jeff. Because we wanted to talk about good design, bad design that we’ve seen in the world and maybe what we’ve taken away from the book.

Jeff:

Yeah. So first I want to talk about design sins that you as a designer have committed in life, in your work. Or like of your clients where like you’re just like, oh my God, that’s terrible.

Jacob:

Yeah. I think the thing that I always am worried about with website design, and I’ve been burned on this a handful of times, is forms, making forms that people can fill out successfully that have to do responsive steps. Long forms, not like, you know, not a contact form, but when you need to fill out a quote…

Jeff:

Like if you’re building a building and you’re trying to get an estimate and you’re trying to have that all be automated online on a website instead of having to call someone, those kind of…

Jacob:

And have meaningful calculations for end users. That’s a lot of affordance, signifiers and making sure that you can show people what it can do and it can clearly be followed. But what happens after you click a form, that was like a really big problem early in website development is when you hit submit, you need to let someone know it worked. Okay? You need to let someone know that it’s working while you’re waiting. So you need to have all these feedback things that will happen that show that the affordance of a form, if I’m using the word right, is that I can fill this out and I can contact the company. However…

Jeff:

Yes, a form affords filling out.

Jacob:

Right. It affords a communication step, right? But what would happen is, you would click it, right? And then if there wasn’t, when the forms were slower, they’re a lot faster now. But when you click it, and if it didn’t have the little like load icon that would come out, you know what people would do? They’d…

Jeff:

Click it again?

Jacob:

Click it again. And then what would happen is the server could literally like jam up submitting this. Or you could have multiple submissions trigger at once, creating an error and you wouldn’t know that the error happened because it happened server side.

So when you fill out a form, let’s say you type in the email wrong and we have a little check that says you didn’t have an @ symbol or .com or whatever. Back in the day, you had to make a little red thing that shows up on that form. Right?

Jeff:

Right.

Jacob:

Okay. So that’s like a little signifier, a little warning to say, hey, we locked this form because you failed to do X. And then basically what happens is the form will disappear and maybe show a thank you message. So what would happen is people would just hope that it worked, right? But what you need to do, and what people have learned to do, is that the user doesn’t have the faith in the website program that it succeeded.

Jeff:

Okay.

Jacob:

So sometimes they may come back in a day and fill it out again to be like, did you get my form the other day? So what you need to do is have another step where the user then gets an email confirmation delivered to them. And then when the form’s totally filled out, instead of keeping them on the page and just showing them a message, it’s better to actually redirect them to a page that shows a clear thank you message that your form was received. We got it. You went to a whole new place.

But this was a big thing like 12 years ago. Like people would be mad, and this would create a lot of frustration because basically it would feel like you fill it, I’m sure you’ve had this before, but you fill it out and you just don’t know that it actually worked.

Jeff:

I just always assumed that it does. That’s just the way my brain works.

Jacob:

A lot of people, especially in the B2B industrial sector, if you didn’t give them notification and signal that their thing worked, they will be coming back. They will be calling you and they’ll be telling you your website doesn’t work.

Jeff:

In a B2B setting, I can totally understand that. 12 years ago, I was in college, so I didn’t care.

Jacob:

Anyways, that would be a clear design sin that I was like working through with people on a regular basis and overcoming that early on in my career. And now you know you can have it. So the thank you message says things like, thank you Bob for filling out our message.

Jeff:

And also it can be like “Next steps too, like.”..

Jacob:

Like, you can call us now if you really need something urgent. Here’s how many days it will take for your business. Here’s all these things. That little step in a website is a very big, you know, design like tool that needs to be done well. So I think I’ve talked enough on that.

Fav designs: soap bottle

Jeff:

All right, let’s move on to our favorite designed things. So Jacob, what is something in your life that you think is perfectly designed or something whose design delights you?

Jacob:

You know, before the episode you told me one, and I really want you to go first because I liked it.

Jeff:

Oh, okay. The thing that delights me, so I had a hard time thinking of something that I thought was like “Really well designed.” And the only thing I could think of is the soap bottles that sit on their head.

Jacob:

So what brand is this soap bottle that sits on your head? Is this like a dish soap bottle or like a…

Jeff:

Yeah. Like dish soap, hand soap. Not all of my soaps are like that. They should be.

Jacob:

You don’t have to like shake it when it gets low or, you know, if it has a pump like pumps, you can’t get all of it out ever. Like, not even close. There’s probably like 10 to 15% of whatever’s in a pump bottle left. Those are my least favorite.

Jacob:

You know, it reminds me of the Heinz when they went from the glass bottle…

Jeff:

Like the ketchup bottles that sit on their head. It’s the same.

Jacob:

Yes. It’s a very simple solution that has resulted into everybody does that now.

Jeff:

Well, he brings up in the book too, just like, why, like why did it take so long for people to make these changes? Like, one of them was a vegetable peeler and it’s like all, all they did was, yeah, OXO, all they did was make the handle bigger and made of plastic instead of metal. And that’s the standard now because it’s in every way superior to the old school ones that were just a metal loop.

Jacob:

Yes. And I thought it was really smart. I liked how he approached, the guy who invented OXO, the brand was approaching it to solve an arthritis problem for his spouse. And he didn’t even market it that way either. It was better. It worked for arthritis too, but everybody adopted it and it was great.

Jeff:

Yeah. It’s like soap bottles are like that. You shouldn’t have pumps on them. They shouldn’t sit on their base. They should sit on the top where the soap comes out. That’s just, it should be everywhere. And I think that that happened in our lifetime. We witnessed the change.

Jacob:

Yes. The soap…

Jeff:

We were on the front lines for innovation on soap bottles.

Transition

Jeff:

Yeah. So that was my design thing that delights me. What is your design thing that you can’t stand in day-to-day life?

Jacob:

I forgot what I was gonna say.

Jeff:

I forget what you were gonna say either as well. What’d you say? That sucked.

Jacob:

Yeah, I think I’m so used to things being mildly…

Jeff:

Irritating. Yeah.

Jacob:

That I’m not really, I’m…

Jeff:

Things usually are not great. And this was another thing he talked about in the book, the people who are buying the products are usually not the end user. And so manufacturers are designing products for the people who buy them. And it’s not necessarily the same people who use them, which is like, I can see how so many things in our life, just they, like manufacturers don’t get the correct feedback on usability for a lot of things because we’re not the ones buying them like, like ovens or appliances, you know?

Jacob:

Oh yes. All right, I got it. I got what I want. Okay, let me go back. We can, you can…

Jeff:

All right. That’s fine. I can, I can figure it out.

Jacob:

I like what you said though. We should keep what you just said.

Car talk

Jacob:

All right. The thing that bothers me is, so I have a, it’s really funny. I build modern websites for people, but personally, I’m a bit of a laggard when it comes to some other tech because I like things with real buttons and it is really futuristic cars. Like when I get a rental car…

Jeff:

Oh my God, Jacob, we’re on the same page with this one.

Jacob:

Well, well, well, I haven’t been in a Tesla, so I’m gonna give some room for them for their interface. But I, let’s say I wanna hook up my Bluetooth phone to the car. And they have all these really nice like interfaces and stuff like that, but I just need to figure out what to do. And they put so many buttons and they put so many things into menus within menus to like hook up to the Bluetooth. And then you have all these extra buttons, right? To just drive a car.

And in the book, Don Norman was talking about featuritis. I could not stop thinking about these brand new Hondas and Fords that have all these things that are like, this does not allow me to successfully peacefully drive a car and listen to a podcast.

Jeff:

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Jacob:

And it’s like, that frustrates me to no end spending 10 minutes getting in a new rental car or getting that set up when it’s like on my car…

Jeff:

What do you drive?

Jacob:

2009 Honda CRV. It doesn’t have Bluetooth, right? So I have a little dongle that I plug into the auxiliary cable, and you instantly get the Bluetooth on it and you hit one button on your, on the stereo. And I, I’m set with the music. I turn the car on and within 30 seconds I’m ready to go. But also the first time I put in that thing, to hook up the car, I had the music playing within about 30 seconds as well on the first install.

Versus I get into the space age car and I’m spending 10 minutes sitting in a parking lot…

Jeff:

Right.

Jacob:

Waiting to figure this out. So that’s my thing that frustrates me a lot is when I get in there and the technology has overcomplicated such basic things that have been solved.

Jeff:

So, yes, absolutely. And like I said, I’m on the same page. Because my thing that I think is terribly designed is, so I drive a Prius 2010, so it’s the third generation Prius. The third generation Prius, I just wanna say is like one of the best designed cars I’ve ever been in my whole life. And then when like, they came out with the fourth generation, it was my friend Claire, and she had one, we were on a road trip.

I was driving and the display was so complicated. I was like, I can’t even see how fast I’m going because it’s giving me so much information. And it did use, you know, in the book they talk about mode states. So if you only have X amount of controls, you can change mode. So those same controls can do different things. And then to always let the user know what mode you’re in when you’re using the controls. So they did a good job with that, where the panel would be red if you were in one mode, or blue if you were in another or something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

You’d think so? It was just more confusing and it was just like, I didn’t feel safe driving that car. And it’s the same car, like, it’s just the next generation of what I was driving in mine. The display has one color. And you can toggle between different display settings of like your hybrid system indicators. But it’s, sort of like tab on a computer. You just tab through them and there’s only five choices anyway. But there aren’t multiple colors. And it’s just so much simpler but still giving you all of the information that you could possibly want.

And I just hate new cars. I agree. And also I wanna say, and I think that everybody agrees with this, that physical buttons when you’re driving are so much better because you can feel for them, you don’t have to look at a screen.

Jacob:

Yes. Yes, and not too many buttons either. That was the problem with some of the other cars that I had.

Camera

Jacob:

So let’s talk about some other good designs just for a second. I do wanna talk about my cameras as a great example of old design that I wish people would figure out how to go back to, to a certain degree. So I do film photography for fun and I really got in a passion for cameras of the sixties and seventies and fifties. And I have some from the fifties that still work perfectly today. And they don’t operate on any battery power. It’s like clockwork mechanism.

But the nicest thing about them is all the feedback was done in a very sophisticated way that you could be independent. Like you weren’t beholden to some program, right? Or anything that had to interact with it. You didn’t have a lot of interfaces. You could set your f-stop, your shutter speed, your focus and focusing with rangefinders was really easy. It would tell you exactly where it is. And then when you crank the film winder that puts all the kinetic energy into the system that runs the shutter and moves the film at the same time, and it just works forever. I have some rangefinders that have no battery.

I would love to see this come back too, this kind of like minimalist low energy systems. I don’t know what that would be necessarily, but in film photography, if someone would make a new film camera, I’d be pretty happy with that. But like really there were the ones in the fifties. I mean, what a great design era, and there’s so many things about that time where it had this perfect balance of usability mixed with longevity.

Jeff:

It was the pinnacle of the analog era. So you could think of it as being like high analog, like high renaissance. And now we’re in the very beginning still of the digital era. So it’s like all these design things with digital products, I feel like we’re still figuring out. And maybe in like 50 to 100 years, the elegance of user interface will be like so much more than it is today. And you know, we’ll look back and be like, oh, these poor saps using their, you know, the beginning era of digital devices. Like they got screwed.

Jacob:

Yeah, that’s true. And I feel like as soon as digital started happening, we’re trying to like rely on that tech so much just to facilitate certain functions that maybe don’t need to be electrified at all. That’s what I learned from when I got into cameras, was just how functional things can be without electricity if they’re well designed. And I think like electricity is really taken for granted, and I think in a bad way when it comes to design for like basic, or we have to hook this up to wifi now, like all the time now.

Jeff:

Yeah. Why does my refrigerator need to be on the internet?

Jacob:

Yeah, exactly. There’s like this obsession with over electrifying things that I feel like is a little, a little dumb. But anyways…

Netflix Rabbit tech—website design

Jeff:

So Jacob, going back to website design, what are some websites that you think are perfectly designed and some that you think are absolute garbage?

Jacob:

So I think a website design that’s really good for its intended purpose has to be Netflix. I think Netflix has done such a great job as a video streaming service that almost everything tries to mimic Netflix or did for a really long time. It was so functional, simple, you can do everything that you needed on it.

Jeff:

So Netflix did it first. They did it best in terms of interacting with a streaming service, both on computers or phones or like smart TVs. They do it well. What I don’t understand is why companies like Amazon and Apple have the worst user interface for their streaming services. I cannot stand it.

Jacob:

Yeah, I feel like this might be something that I don’t think was explored in the book, but designers being different to be different.

Jeff:

Sure, yeah.

Jacob:

Like I feel like that’s a problem. Because I agree with you, Amazon, they’ve updated that a couple of times. It’s getting better, but…

Jeff:

It’s getting better. Like five years ago it was atrocious. They’ve gotten better.

Jacob:

It felt like, I was like “Are you sure this isn’t Roku 0.”1? Like what is this? I thought you were Amazon. This is weird.

Jeff:

You clearly have the resources to throw some money at this and you’re just not. Yeah.

Jacob:

Yeah. I think that because what Amazon did was, it felt like they got someone who was an engineer to make it and be like “Well this is functional.” This is a list of titles. You can’t read them very well on a small screen or a medium sized screen, but there is a list of titles. Or when you wanna turn on subtitles, you can, you just have to turn on the settings. You have to go to the subtitle option, click it, then decide which one do you want, off, on or this one…

Jeff:

Yeah.

Jacob:

You go to Netflix and it’s like one click to…

Jeff:

Right. Well, yeah. Well, it’s right there on the screen, which is where it should be. You shouldn’t have to navigate away, but anyway.

Jacob:

Yeah. It felt like Amazon is an example of we have an engineer making a product and Netflix is a designer working with engineers to make a good holistic solution for humans. It was a really good navigation. That’s a really good example.

Rabbit Tech

Jacob:

And I think my favorite newer website that I have seen from design and information standpoint of like you can actually learn on this website would be Rabbit Tech. I also have a Rabbit R1 device, and I think their website does a great job of going simple and like sticking with conventions, but they have really nice modern layouts. All the information is very well presented. There’s very delightful animations, interactions, high quality photos, and very simple to read text and text sizes that it’s like, it feels not only engaging as a website, but it’s accessible as a website.

And there’s really nothing that is, I would say, wildly confusing. And they do a lot of delightful things like they change the way the mouse looks and stuff like that. So that’s a really good one.

Nothing Tech

Jacob:

I think a website that does a mixed bag is Nothing Tech. That’s a phone company that makes kind of like cutting edge weird phones with like cool lights where they actually, like if you go on their website now, their menu size of the website is always phone width, and everything else on desktop goes outside of that. But they’re like, if you go to any of their phones, their landing pages for them, the information buttons are all over the place in different places on desktop.

And they don’t even look like things you can click on. They just simply look like highlights. And I remember going through the site going like, where’s the specs? Where’s the specs? And then I have to find this floating doodad that’s animated off to the side. And you’re like, what the, I can’t, I just need to know something.

Jeff:

Right.

Jacob:

So that was, I feel like Rabbit is a great example of sticking with conventions and pushing it to a really great level and Nothing Tech is a good example to me of a technology product that is breaking conventions, but to a level that makes it difficult to actually use their product website.

Jeff:

Yeah, they’re not, and he says in the book, everything else being equal, stick with the convention. Unless there’s a really good reason to break with convention, don’t. And it’s like, I’m looking at their website right now and I can tell exactly what you’re talking about where it’s just I, are these like pictures of the phone or like pictures that the phone took? Or is this a button?

Jacob:

Yeah. And then when you start clicking on it, then you discover that it’s a button. But then as you scroll up and down the page too, things are like moving in and out of your way and then back in your way and out of your way and in your way. And so it creates a very like, unnerving, like, what am I, what am I doing here? Moment, which I don’t like. So those are two great examples.

Yale Art School

Jacob:

And then you, my friend found the best bad website.

Jeff:

I found one, the Yale and apparently it’s like known for this, I dunno, maybe they kind of do it on purpose. But the Yale School of Art website is a wiki that art students at Yale can edit freely and they have just taken that mandate and ran off a cliff with it because it is the worst website I’ve ever seen in my life. And this is like, we grew up in the nineties. I remember the era of terrible websites.

Jacob:

Like 600 pixel wide.

Jeff:

Unusable. Cluttered. No navigation. I remember what those are like. The Yale website gives them all a run for their money. It’s absolutely terrible. But it’s also like a living art project and it just goes to show you crowdsourcing website design from a bunch of art students at Yale is evidently a terrible idea.

Jacob:

Yeah. Like it’s hard to know what to do with that website. That’s the best example. So if you did pick on the Human Friend Digital website, I think we do our own design very conventional. I felt like in business you wanna stay conventional. You don’t wanna startle your users when they come to your site. And you also wanna be able to present information really clearly. Like if they need to know some information, clear links, clear descriptions, is so important to make people feel like they found what they’re looking for.

And that’s really what I’m striving for in my design anymore. But I think, website design aside, no matter what, if you’re making a digital experience, having clear signifiers, colors, information, something that is logical, but is also delightful, is so important.

Duolingo

Jacob:

And I think you also found the best one too, Duolingo. I think they have got it down.

Jeff:

They do a really great job, especially with feedbacks, with their signifiers, affordances. You can tell what you’re supposed to do on the website. It’s really easy. And, you know, gamification obviously. They were kind of like one of the pioneers in gamifying like homework-y kinds of work. Yeah, but they do a really great job of it. So…

Jacob:

And I think one thing that is good to note, I have to say, I’m gonna try to learn a little bit more from them in a design sense. Because I’ve been using it as an app and not thinking I should apply a lot of that knowledge to a website. But what they do really well is when they do multi-step lessons or when you’re reading stuff on their site, they really understand the attention span of a person.

And I think that’s something that, you know, maybe gets a little lost in design. And even when we were picking on this book at the beginning of the podcast, because it didn’t play well with your attention span. And that I think is something that I’d like to take away from this too, is like, I wonder where I can explore attention and making sure that we can use it right and structure content well.

Jeff:

You know, Jacob, that book, when our version of the book was published, it was already 25 years old. And you think that people 35 years ago had our attention spans? No, Jacob, our attention spans have collapsed as a population.

Jacob:

No, wait a second. Now I’ve read big books, like…

Jeff:

Sure.

Jacob:

Books that are fantasy.

Jeff:

Yeah. That are narrative based. That’s totally different.

Jacob:

See, and that is where I think one of the things that is wrong with this book, if you’re going to do the length and you’re going to get us to have to sit down for two hours with you in a chunk, right? To get a whole topic, you need to give me a narrative to go with it.

Jeff:

I’m just saying 35 years ago, people didn’t need that. We’re weaker. We’re weaker.

Jacob:

I don’t know.

Jeff:

We’ve been coddled by phones and Instagram, although you’re not on social media, but still…

Jacob:

Yeah, that’s true.

Outro

Jacob:

But, all right, well Jeff, on that note, I would like to say I love you as a friend. But I am annoyed that I had to read this book that was so helpful and educational, but was also 10 hours long. So…

Jeff:

Don’t forget that some people with small children don’t have all the time in the world.

Jacob:

No, it’s true. I felt like I was listening to it doing the dishes, cooking a little bit before bed, and then I was also listening to this on like 1.5 speed a lot to be like “I gotta get it done by Friday.” We’re gonna have the podcast. So it’s like “That’s a.”..

Jeff:

And here I was just like very casually, just like going through it again. Just like ba ba, ba, ba, ba. And you’re just like trying to speed listen.

Jacob:

Yeah. So, no, I was gonna say, Jeff, thanks for recommending this book. I think it was a good one. I’m gonna be looking around now for our next book on this series, but this has been a very good educational process for me and hopefully for you too, to have these books as a part of our podcast series. I think it’s been very…

Jeff:

Yeah, I think it’s fun. I look forward to whatever you choose next for our book club, Jacob.

Jacob:

Great. It’s gonna be the Silmarillion that doesn’t really relate to…

Jeff:

Work that into business. Like, even you couldn’t do that as big of a Tolkien fan as you are.

Jacob:

Well, what about the economics of Khazad-dûm?

Jeff:

No, then you wanna talk about economics in a fantasy world. Let’s talk about George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire…