No! I said…what kind of a designer are YOU?

In the short time since I started designing, I have had a bunch of titles to describe my role; some I chose myself when freelancing, and some were given by the companies that I worked for. I have been a web designer, a user interface designer, an interaction designer, a user experience designer and most recently, a product designer. As I have moved from one title to the other, the industry has evolved and it is much easier to see some of those patterns in hindsight. What does your role, really encompass when you say you are a designer at a startup, or more importantly what all can it encompass that will help you be better at what you are trying to be? What does it mean to be a designer for the digital medium? What does it mean to design a digital product?

The startup is the new agency

It is not the biggest surprise that some of the finest designers of products happen to work at tech companies and startups. I would argue that a startup or a larger tech company that cares deeply about design (I can definitely attest for Facebook being one) is a better place to bootstrap your career in design than any traditional design agency. There are lot of reasons for this but the biggest and most obvious ones in my head are the breadth of projects and the quick learning curve. Today you could be designing the logo and the larger brand of the new app that is about to launch, and the next day you are back to tweaking the flow of the app based on new user testing nuggets that your CEO passed on from one late-afternoon coffee shop testing. I traded my two year course in ‘interaction design’ for a crash course in design at Pulse. Never made a better decisions in my life.

Products—not just apps or websites

What the hell do I even mean by that? Mostly that our work is no longer confined to interfaces inside a viewport in the browser or on our phones. The apps & the websites are just the means of interaction we enable. We are here to design the larger system of which the apps and websites are one aspect. It is equally our job (or should be, if it is not) to understand how they fit into the larger sphere of things. What is the product market fit? What do the release cycles of the app look like in terms of features? Does it make sense to launch feature A without sub feature 1, 2 and 3 which are part of the next release cycle? How similar do the app and the website need to be? Do they need to be optimized for particular use cases versus being at feature parity? What about our iPad app? How does the account creation flow work if a user connects via Facebook on iPhone but closes the app before they complete their profile? How do we handle this edge case if they open the app on a desktop device next? How does their data sync across platform and what are the design affordances for it? In a world of A/B tests and instrumentation of design, how do you tell the stories that need telling.

…[In] situations where the product is facing an incumbent and there are complimentary network effects, it’s simply not enough to launch a well designed product. - Johnnie Manzari

Iterations

For most cases in the past, designing something meant working with a client on a project for a few weeks and giving a ‘final deliverable’ and working briefly with the engineers in some case. The client could always hire for the next project, but as far as the old project was concerned, that was it. Welcome to the world where the job is never done. The job really starts from What we are trying to build and ends on how what we released has been performing—which is arguably for as long as the product exists. Are there any major drop offs in the funnel? With tools of today, it is easier than ever to be in the know of the story that data has to tell about the product. What about the things that are not working as you had hoped, can we do a quick revision and submit to App store in 2 days? The feedback loop is shorter and tighter. This also means we have to be okay with things not being perfect. This one in particular is at odds to the perfectionist in us. The thing that makes it better to wrap our heads around is that you have forever to make it perfect. Keep iterating.

Prototyping

When you see a live, polished, interactable demo, you can instantly understand how something is meant to work and feel, in a way that words or long descriptions or wireframes will never be able to achieve. And that leads to better feedback, and better iterations, and ultimately a better end product. - Julie Zhuo This is a medium that is not static. This is a medium that enables affordances that other mediums of the past did not. This is a medium for which photoshop should not be the end, but merely a milestone in the journey of creation. Use what you are comfortable in, Quartz, Framer or good old HTML/CSS/JS. The end goal is to get more insight and feedback and be able to better envision how the design works and not just what it looks like. Use all means necessary and at your disposal.

Own the product: Being proactive & executing

This might seem like an odd item to add to the list, but of all the above mentioned qualities, this has to be the one that is the most important. Gone are the days when someone will be carrying over a spec document of project requirements and leaving it on your desk for you to look at. You are responsible for the product. Think of it like your own baby. Does it need caressing, go do it. Nobody will be sending you emails about it, but it is implied that this is YOUR job. Worry less about the ideal process and more about the outcome—the impact. Hack your way around traditional UX practices that make it feasible for a 2 person design team to do everything from user research to communication design, while always knowing the magic sauce is the product and it’s execution and not the process. Maybe even ditch the traditional notion of UX for a far more opinionated product. Follow what works for you and your product.

We don’t have our journal of record, our vocabulary is splintered and vague, our processes are inconsistent, but this is the beginning of something important. - David Cole The field of designing digital products has just begun to come together. There are common grounds and there are disagreements. New mediums are being added, while old ones fade away. In the coming years, what do you want to see when you look at your phone or through a pair of glasses or glance at your watch or stare at that screen that mimics the TV in your living room? What kind of products do you want to design for this medium? What kind of a designer will you be?

Originally posted on Medium

Originally posted on Medium

Isn’t it ironic and amusing at the same time that we live in an age when #nofilter is almost a badge of honor for a media? A sign of pride shouting this is the moment as it happened—nothing tampered. Take it for its flaws and it’s charm. Remember it forever, for this is how I want you to remember it.

That brings me to memory. Remember what it was like when memory was the only way to remember the past and thereby forget it? Sure people used to write diaries and take photographs, but those were few and far. What your first date was, was not based on a photo on your timeline, but just in a hazy yet cherished corner inside your brain. It’s almost as if memory has a way of applying a filter of it’s own. Making everything so charming, just like the filters.

In our minds we can toy with memories and relive them, perhaps smoothing the rough edges a bit to make the thought more pleasant to hold. Complete video documentation of our lives seems harsh and too true to the details, unlike the comforting, hazy, quality of a true memory. — Kyle Meyer

With the tools of today, we started down the road to preserve ‘all’ moments. Creating timelines, profiles that are in a way a public version of journals—of our memories. For one and all to see. Maybe even judge. Maybe that’s why we needed filters. To make the moment feel more beautiful than it really was—to give it that hazy quality of memory, as Kyle puts it. To make it magical. To make what had now become permanent, pretty. But what fun would it be if life were all but a series of magical moments.

Sadly, this also means that all we cherish are pretty pictures and happy thoughts with a shade of vanity. Because who would want to know about how low you feel right now. Our profiles are not really us, but just how we want others to see us. There is something that is not right here. Something has to give in. Change. Evolve.

Does this change look like the flood of ephemeral networks we have been seeing lately? I really doubt that. I often wonder if Snapchat and others are an over-correction. A generation-wide knee jerk reaction due to the side effects that nobody had planned for. I don’t have an answer. But I do wish for a more casual sharing and more #nofilter shots in my feed.

“By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?”

This quote from Steve is my standard response to naysayers. People whose only job is to find faults in efforts of others. This is the veil behind which I hide the rush of anger in those situations. I wish I had to use it less often though.

Update: People pointed me towards Roosevelt's “The Man in the Arena“

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

For the last two years, I have been thinking a lot about content. How people consume news, discover it and more importantly what the future of content most probably looks like. RSS is a major part of how the content gets distributed around. In many cases — for news apps like Pulse, Flipboard etc — it might be abstracted from the users, but at the end of the day it is an integral part. If re-imagining RSS as the syndication layer is on your task-list, then some of the ideas around rethinking RSS might be relevant to you. It is a by product of inefficiencies in the current system and unnecessary reinventing of the wheel for every startup that tries to build a news app. I am taking the liberty to assign this with a pet name — Pulsar.

A side note before we dive in. This is not about Google Reader. It has nothing to do with Google shutting Reader down — which I think was a decision that we will thank them for — because of the amazing services around content it would lead to. Be that out of frustration or necessity or both. Having made that distinction clear, let's begin.

Abstract it from end user

This is a no-brainer. All that the end user should ever need to care about is the name of the publisher/blogger/writer they want to stay updated from. The process should be as simple as typing the name in search box or just clicking on add source button under the publisher logo. No feed urls, not API endpoints. Never.

Truly real time

RSS was never truly real time. There were projects like ‘pubsubhubbub’ to make it seem real time, but that never truly happened. It was always a few minutes behind which makes it almost useless for anyone who wants to be on top of news. Also in the age when Twitter and Facebook are the Way to discover news for most people, why this is important, especially if you are trying to build a reading experience, is not hard to fathom. Giving publishers the power to push content or information about new content is a strategic advantage over other large scale syndication & content infrastructures — assuming you are not the only one building such a thing.

A content API for publishers, not just a document syndication format

Today, content is a commodity. There are multiple places people can read the same content. Which means there is a lot more information around the core content that services can use and create better experiences for publishers. Some of them, in no particular order, are below:

• Main article & summary
• Revision history/updates
• Media associated with text — video, audio and photos (intentionally separated)
• Publisher info
• Author info
• Number of shares (Facebook, Twitter and other networks)
• Number of reads (polled or real time)
• Entities referenced in the article (people, places, events, things)
• Related articles from same/other publisher
• Pre reading for an article
• Further reading for article
• Discussions
• Semantic information to convey and use branding and templates for different content types

Think of what the exchange format looks like

I am not an API designer or an engineer, but I am not sure if XML is still the best interchange format for this purpose or what we are aiming for this to be. Content today is much less about being a single document and a lot more about the data around it. Something like JSON might serve us better based on the above listed requirements.

Entities and commerce hooks

Can you make it easy for publishers to syndicate context around articles. Be that around related stories or be that around more information about the people mentioned in an article. If a story about the revolution in Syria is syndicated via your API, would not it be amazing if the reader has easy access to find out more about some key entities like leaders referenced in the article? It could even be something as simple as a link to a Wikipedia article. Another one is the commerce hooks. Often articles have links to buy things or recommend gadgets. Can there be a unified payments API that makes it simpler for publishers for all kinds and types to process payments without having to leave the app they were accessing the content from? The app developer would merely have a request handler or callback URL for certain types of links and the API handles everything else.

Security credentials

Extending the last point to premium subscriptions. Can this new format make it easier for publishers to syndicate premium content rather than force them to the limited options of paywalls or a Newsstand model on iOS?

A two way exchange

If the last few pointers are any indication of the direction I would ideally dream for this, then it is clear that this would benefit from being a two way exchange. Publishers should not only be able to use this to send information and content, but also be able to receive useful information like user's device type, maybe even information about identity, location etc after due permissions have been given by the user. It is not hard to imagine of exciting possibilities that begin to emerge when articles can be sent in real time and the publisher knows my location. Am I the only one getting excited at the thought of publishers playing with certain aspects of articles in real time depending on geolocation, time of the day etc?

Discussions

So far the discussions on the web around articles have not been a smooth experience. Leave alone the point about the quality of these discussions. Every publisher has their own discussion platform. Worse yet, news apps often are ambitious to try their own discussion platform. Sadly RSS does not syndicate these discussions with the main article and frankly it was never designed to. It is so broken that we have a startup like Branch, that is trying to make the two totally separate and promote discussions as a content form of its own. Would this change if discussions travelled with the content, no matter where it was made accessible?

A dashboard for Publishers

If Google's treatment of it's feed related products is any indicator, then Feedburner is on it's way out. A company or tool that makes it easier for publishers to have all of their content related data in one place irrespective of whether it is being viewed on publisher's site or being viewed on a third party app, is a huge and complex opportunity in itself.

An experience that matches the content

This is probably a designer's special request more than something truly broken with RSS. I feel the future of clutter free reading experience cannot simply be a visually stripped, almost un-styled blob of text that Readability, Instapaper and Pocket are pushing for. The experience of reading an article in the Economist magazine is different from the experience of reading a story on GQ. Can these intangible aspects of experience be syndicated with the help of typography, color, font styles and maybe even a few templates for different content types? Can our content API be the channel for this syndication?

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There are a ton of other aspects of problems with RSS that I may have missed. Some that I might not even be aware of. I will keep updating this entry as I think of more. If you feel there is something that can push the craziness of this idea further and in the right direction, let me know. If you are thinking of working on this and want to chat more, I would love to brainstorm more.

Who knows, maybe the person who creates the next syndication platform is reading this in some news app via RSS! That would be mildly ironic now, wouldn't it?

Further Reading

Why I love RSS and you do too