Are Design Patterns an Anti-pattern?
Design patterns are generally considered a good thing, but do they actually help run a user experience group? As a user experience group manager and an observer (and sponsor) of design pattern exercises, I’ve come to have serious questions about their actual utility. It’s not that design pattern libraries are bad, but that in a world of limited resources, it is it is not clear that the investment is worth it. Fortunately, there is a better approach: reaching outside the design group to solve the whole problem.
An interaction design pattern is a “general, reusable solution” “to common usability or accessibility problems”. They usually consist of pictures and descriptions of the best way to handle a GUI design element, such as a date picker. Libraries of them are found online (see below) and in many institutions with a user experience practice. Like all tools, they exist to solve a problem; but what is the problem?
They are generally said to help:
- instruct junior user experience people
- save time of documenting design details in every project
- make collaboration with developers easier
- encourage consistency
The case against design patterns
Pattern libraries have laudable goals, but in practice, design patterns do not support how teams actually work. Practically, the pattern approach assumes that the users:
- know (and remember 3 months later) that the pattern library exists
- quickly find the pattern that they need
- know how to interpret the language
- know when to apply a particular pattern and how much they can deviate
- have the time and motivation to continue documenting ideas
Design patterns are not effective training tools.
Patterns, once literally a design on paper that could be copied, in UX are an abstract idea that professionals can reference. You can not copy a UX pattern, like you can copy a sewing pattern. Having someone read a pattern library will not make them a competent user experience designer. It would be akin to teaching writing by reading the dictionary – the “why”s are not answered.
Design patterns don’t replace UX expertise
Design patterns can be a useful reference point for the junior user experience designer. But experienced professionals find ideas and inspiration in the whole world. Should your team invest time in making a pattern library as a training tool, or just change the way they work? Should they spend time on documentation or collaborate on projects? Should junior people learn from the documents or, as is typical in the crafts, apprentice with an experienced designer?
Completeness and learn-ability are in conflict.
In order for a pattern to be used, it has to be easily read. But completely describing even the simplest UI pattern (like a two-panel selector) requires such detail as to prevent the person from absorbing it. Additionally, any design pattern I’ve seen inevitable contains “it depends” clauses, which leave the important decisions right back with the reader.
Pattern libraries suffer from a similar problem. Many seem to start by defining the basics, to answer questions like “when should one use radio buttons versus a drop down menu”, but lose steam before they get to the complex pieces. This is ironic, as the complex interactions are the ones that need the most definition, and offer the most creative opportunity. Defining the pattern of a radio button, is necessary for completeness, but not a good use of time or creative energies.
Design Patterns take a lot of investment.
The investment in the library needs to pay off in later efficiency to be successful. But each pattern is essentially a mini design project with extreme documentation and design reviews. Having corresponding template widgets is an additional effort, as is updating the designs when the inevitable rebranding comes along. (I’m already tired just writing this.) If your team uses more than one design tool (InDesign, OmniGraffle, Visio), who is going to update all the versions?
Design Patterns should help non – UX people first
Design patterns reduce work for UX people, but they clearly increase work for developers. Developers operate under time pressures and need a spec to code to. Directing them to look at a pattern library means that they have to find, parse, code, and review the pattern, in addition to the wireframe. The design pattern’s open ended nature requires them to read a general case and code a specific case. Because they are just designs, they can also ignore the ugly complexities in many of the problems, by simply not addressing them.
Design Patterns don’t work with a normal designer’s motivation – indeed, they seek to restrain it. When a person sits down at their drawing program to address a problem, a reference document is several steps away, especially under time pressure. They almost always want to design rather than copy, especially, when it is unclear if a new situation is different “enough” from an existing pattern. On the contribution side, any change will entail a review with peers, which could take weeks to finalize, too slow for a project. Large organizations who most need a pattern library (many practitioners) are least able to build one (complex organizations, conflicting deadlines).
Why do people make design pattern libraries anyway?
I’ve never heard of a business owner or technology lead asking for a design pattern library. They seem to arise from internal concerns rather than external requests. What if the motivation is not really project efficiency, but something more personal?
Pattern libraries seem to be made by a UX person who wants to put a stamp on how things SHOULD be done. To establish, once and for all, the right way to do something. The design pattern library could be more akin to building a model train set: like the real world, but controllable. They are like design projects without clients or time pressure. “Just this once, we’ll do it perfect”. A participant at a recent New York IXDA event said with pride that he personally had created several pattern libraries –it was a personal accomplishment, not a business achievement. No one can argue with how a person spends their free time, but teams have to make sure work time is spent wisely.
The downside to this motivation is that individual authors want to create their own collection, which inevitably duplicates the other libraries. Pattern Libraries also tend to be abandoned when the author loses enthusiasm after the initial burst of activity. Even the major sites like Yahoo and Welie have stalled. The last update on Yahoo was 2 years ago; Welie was 4 years ago.
What is the solution then?
Let’s apply the user centered design process to this situation. Using the goal of “better designed products and increased productivity”, we can identify the three potential audiences of an enterprise Pattern Library: User Experience, the Business representatives, and Technology.
The UX group is primarily concerned with consistency and best practices. This is culture, not documentations and should be managed as such:
- Culture is built through personal interaction. Review, Review, Review. Regularly meet to share work, and best practices.
- Patterns do not mean your design sense can go on auto-pilot.
- Build a collaborative culture referring each other’s work. (“Joe worked on something like that.”)
- When a new design challenge appears, get a bunch of people to talk it over, get “good enough” agreement.
- Document decisions quickly and spread widely, for example on a wiki (so any one can edit it).
- Focus on content first, make the pretty library template as a reward for reaching 20 patterns.
Business and Technology are primarily concerned with getting work done and reducing costs. The biggest efficiency gain is reducing development time, focus on giving developers the tools and guides they need. The biggest issue is that typically, UX people do not code. The solution is to get out of the design cave and work with people who do.
Create a design ecosystem instead of documentation.
People do not RTFM. Period. It is hard to get people to engage with any documentation on their own. They are happy to read the details about what they want, but are put off by finding it inside a large document or library. The solution is to create an ecosystem where each piece reinforces the others. iPods were well-designed devices, but they succeeded because of the ecosystem (devices +iTunes + stores + accessories). Music was easy to find and buy, and easy to put on the computer. The overall experience of the ecosystem is what determines the success. When you say the answer is a document, rather than a community, it turns people off and limits their contribution.
The ecosystem should be composed of:
- People: Developers, Designers, and business leads. People who can answer questions, who are motivated by their own job requirements and professional pride
- Code library and documentation
- Management demand
A code library beats a pattern library
The code library should be “internal open source”, a shared library enabling developers at a company to share code without worrying about licensing or malware. Instead of the whole org waiting while a centralized team builds the future, let every group contribute.
It should have the most commonly needed components with brief descriptions and links to example implementations, bug tracking and feature requests, supported by an active development and UX mail lists. Make them easily accessible as web pages, not a document. Style guides and pattern libraries get retained even if they are out of date. Social connectivity is much more important than printing them out.
It should have the most commonly needed components with brief descriptions and links to example implementations, bug tracking and feature requests. This is supported by an active development and UX mail lists.
For each presentation layer technologies you support, there should be in Version Control system, with a Main branch, supported by a core team, and an open Contrib branch that anyone can put components in. Good components are promoted to the main branch, which is released in versions, so updates do not break existing apps.
Components should cover three scales:
- Basic styling of standard components
- Custom components, like a date picker or type-ahead
- Page sized components, such as forms,dashboards, or search result pages
How do you get such a library?
In a world of limited resources, one has to boot-strap the Library.
- Build off of the current running projects. Nominate widgets or functions in an active project as “library-worthy” and have them coded abstractly and contributed to the library.
- Publish and reward people who contribute to the library.
- Make a most wanted list and see who has them.
- Solve problems that you actually have, don’t worry about completeness.
- Have the patterns in working code samples accessible by anyone in the firm. Instead of pretty pictures, have the code that actually performs how your want it to. Make the options / parameters editable in the sample, so anyone can play with configuring the sample.
- Look and feel should be a separate code library, released in parallel, so that the design can be upgraded in the future (as it will be) without affecting functionality.
- For general guidelines, write high level guidelines a sketch or two, but point the developers to ask a mailgroup of designers and front end engineers. When a question gets asked enough that it is annoying, code the pattern.
More on design patterns
Pattern Languages for Interaction Design by Will Evans
UI Pattern Documentation Review by Patrick Stapleton
Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Yahoo! Case Study by by Erin Malone, Matt Leacock, and Chanel Wheeler
Are design patterns an anti-pattern? by Stephen Turbek
Dey Alexander’s collection of design pattern resources
Management support is critical -if the project is a “nice to have”, it is doomed. Each project should report what they contributed to the library and what they consumed. A developer’s performance evaluation should list what they contributed to the library and what they re-used -Both save the firm money. At a firm I worked at – a single component, taking 2 weeks of two developers’ time, was re-used over 200 times. This saved 16 person-years of effort -this is real money. Not every component will be so effective; the library team should be focused on the business value of each component and the user experience of the eco system. If done right, the design / code ecosystem has the potential to both improve design and save time, something we can all agree on.
Design patterns are not, in themselves, a bad thing, but in the real world, it’s better to focus on the lifecycle of design, rather than the design process alone. Working together with non designers can make everyone’s life easier, and make the final product as good as the design.
from Boxes and Arrows
UK Court Says You Can Copyright The Basic Idea Of A Photograph
We’ve talked a lot in the past about the “idea/expression dichotomy.” This is an important concept in copyright law that says you can only copyright the specific expression, and not the idea. This is supposed to protect people from getting accused of copyright infringement for basically making something similar to what someone else made. Unfortunately, as we’ve been noting with dismay over the past few years, the idea that there’s some bright line between “idea” and “expression” has been slowly fading away, and courts are, increasingly, effectively wiping out the distinction. In the US, we’ve seen this with the ridiculous case between a photographer, David LaChapelle, and the singer Rihanna, because some of her videos were clear homages to his photographs. The expression was entirely different, but the judge didn’t think so, and Rihanna ended up having to pay up.
Over in the UK, though, we have an even more ridiculous ruling, as pointed out on Boing Boing, where a judge has ruled that a photograph using a similar idea, but totally different composition is infringement. You can see the two photographs here:
I have not found this to be an easy question but I have decided that the defendants’ work does reproduce a substantial part of the claimant’s artistic work. In the end the issue turns on a qualitative assessment of the reproduced elements. The elements which have been reproduced are a substantial part of the claimant’s work because, despite the absence of some important compositional elements, they still include the key combination of what I have called the visual contrast features with the basic composition of the scene itself. It is that combination which makes Mr Fielder’s image visually interesting. It is not just another photograph of cliched London icons.What troubles me here is that this seems to turn the judge into an art critic in order to determine how the different pieces are put together and what counts as expression vs. idea, and what parts are “copied.” Perhaps even more troubling is the following sentence:
Mr Davis submitted that a finding of infringement in this case would give the claimant a monopoly which was unwarranted. He uses the word “monopoly” in a pejorative sense but it does not help. All intellectual property rights are a form of monopoly, properly circumscribed and controlled by the law. In any case I do not accept that a finding for the claimant in this case is unwarranted.While he’s right that all intellectual property rights are a form of monopoly, the question here is whether or not this is an appropriate monopoly. The reason Davis pointed out that this was a problem was because, as the court admitted earlier, the fact is that this would be creating a monopoly on commonly used photographic elements. That’s the problem. Either way, it’s yet another example of copyright law being used to lock up culture.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
from Techdirt.
A Sci-Fi Garden Where Visitors Help Grow A Greener Future
In some ways, H.O.R.T.U.S. feels like any other greenhouse. It has the usual phalanx of wide-spectrum light strips overhead and sunlight pouring into the windows and fresh oxygen pumping through in the air. It’s just missing one thing: actual plants.
Instead, 325 transparent “photobioreactor” bags—enclosed vessels for producing biomass—dangle off the ceiling and incubate nine different species of algae. Interspersed between the algae are 25 additional, larger sacks that contain bioluminescent bacteria. In theory, both organisms can be used to manufacture green energy. H.O.R.T.U.S., then, isn’t so much a greenhouse as it is an unusually chic alternative energy mill.
Here’s another way it differs from most greenhouses: It’s thoroughly interactive. Each algae sack has a long clear plastic tube into which visitors are encouraged to gently blow, oxygenating the algae with the carbon dioxide in their breath. QR codes on each bag give anyone with a smart phone detailed information about the algae they just helped nurture; they can tweet about the organisms, too. Those tweets and QR scans help “grow” a virtual garden on a display screen nearby.
The point? For all the talk about harnessing nature to develop more sustainable ways of living, there’s still a huge disconnect between where green energy is harvested and where it’s consumed. H.O.R.T.U.S. puts algae cultivation right there in your face—or, more precisely, in your mouth—and adds some 21st-century cyber action to show how all of us can participate in sprouting a greener future.
H.O.R.T.U.S. (an acronym for Hydro. Organisms. Responsive. To. Urban. Stimuli) was designed by London-based ecoLogicStudio and is on view at the Architectural Association in London until February. More info here.
[Hat tip to Domus; images courtesy of ecoLogicStudio]
from Co.Design
Pope calls for silence against Internet noise
The Pope would like all of us bloggers to shut the fuck up.
Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday hailed the benefits of silent reflection to stop being “bombarded” by information from the Internet but said social networks could be useful modes of communication.
“People today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware,” the pope said in his now-traditional yearly message on the Vatican and social comunications.
Yeah, people get on the internet and discover that there are child-raping priests in their midsts, and that the Vatican struggles to cover up their crimes…and they never thought to ask, “Is Father Flaherty a buggerin’ child molester?”
But apparently, the Pope likes Twitter.
“In concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible, profound thoughts can be communicated,” the 84-year-old pope said in an apparent reference to the micro-blogging site Twitter.
Concise phrases, like “there is no god” and “you can be good without god” and “fuck the pope” — I agree. There is more profundity on Twitter than in the Bible. Which doesn’t say much about the Bible.
I also discovered something interesting: on the internet, Pharyngula is far more influential than the Bible.
The Vatican’s news website is getting between 8,000 and 10,000 hits a day with peaks of up to 16,000 hits over Christmas, the head of the Holy See’s social media department said on Tuesday.
Uh, really? This is news to be proud of? Pharyngula’s traffic is an order of magnitude greater than that. And I’m just a guy on the internet, with no infallibility or other magic powers.
What will they make of BoingBoing, and aren’t they worried that the anti-christ will spring out of Cute Overload?
from Pharyngula
TMI On The VJ, Toots
(Retail | Louisiana, USA)
(An elderly woman approaches my counter at work.)
Customer: “Excuse me, young man, but is your grandfather’s name Sean?”
Me: “No, ma’am, why do you ask?”
Customer: “You look just like the sailor I celebrated VJ Day with!” *winks*
EC2 for Poets in 2012
Three years ago, I wrote a tutorial called EC2 for Poets that made it relatively easy for a technically proficient user to set up a Windows server in Amazon EC2. A few hundred people tried it, and were able to get servers running. They could install apps, and run web apps that they then could access from home or on the road. Having your own server “up there” can be pretty cool, makes a lot of things possible that otherwise would be hard.
For example you can run a personal river of news. That’s what I do on one of my EC2 instances. Not only for myself but for a few friends at universities and publications. I’m now working on one for a friend who teaches at Harvard. And there’s a biologist at Columbia who’s using Radio2 to keep a linkblog running. This stuff really works, and is not so hard to set up. And once it’s set up, it pretty much runs itself.
Running a server may sound hard. But in practice it’s as easy as running a laptop. In some ways it’s even easier.
And Amazon and Microsoft just made it possible to run an EC2 server for a year for free!
That’s a pretty big deal if you were thinking it might be too expensive just to play around.
So in summary:
1. EC2 for Poets.
2. River2.
Just to be sure everything is working, I set up a River2 installation on a micro EC2 instance, and it really went smoothly.
Deadly bullshit therapy kills Quebec woman
We don’t often talk about it (since we usually have bigger fish to fry), but alternative therapies can be just as dangerous as any other form of superstitious. Most often, the danger in these therapies lies in the fact that “patients” often favor these pseudo-scientific treatments to the real deal, and end up paying for it later. Comedian Andy Kaufman, when diagnosed with cancer, spend his hard earned money on psychic surgery with predictable results. Steve Jobs tried some bullshit diet for the first six months of his cancer treatment rather than rely on “conventional medicine”, and that cost him too.
Speaking of cost, it also amazes me how expensive bullshit medicine really is. Take the case of a young Quebec woman named Chantal Lavigne who recently died of hyperthermia in a therapy session dubbed “dying in consciousness” (insert tasteless joke here). Her guru, a woman named Gabrielle Fréchette -claiming to be channeling the Biblical figure of Melchisedek- wrapped up her followers in plastic and blankets and forced them to hyperventilate. After about 9 hours of this nonsense, Chantal collapsed and was taken to hospital where she was pronounced dead.
Some of her students have paid her over 20,000 dollars for the privilege of being put in danger for no real reason whatsoever. It’s stunning how much some people are willing to spend on fake medicine, especially when these dangerous treatments end up being so deadly. It’s not the first time these kinds of “sweat lodges’ have caused unnecessary deaths. Remember James Ray? He ended up getting 2 years in jail when his bullshit cost the lives of three people (and he got off lucky).
If all of this hasn’t made you mad, perhaps the fact that Gabrielle still plans to hold more of these sessions in the coming months will do the trick. While she maintains that she did her part by calling 911 when Chantal collapsed, it was her direct actions that caused the death of that woman. The fact that people pay her exorbitant amounts of money proves that her “patients” put their trust, and their lives, in the hands of a charlatan. That alone makes her culpable in Chantal death, and I hope the Quebec government agrees with me.
from The Good Atheist
Narrative isn’t usually content either
When I said that narrative was not a game mechanic, but rather a form of feedback, I was getting at the core point that chunks of story are generally doled out as a reward for accomplishing a particular task. And games fundamentally, are about completing tasks — reaching for goals, be they self-imposed (as in all the forms of free-form play or paideia, as Caillois put it in Man, Play and Games) or authorially imposed (or ludus). They are about problem-solving in the sense that hey are about cognitively mastering models of varying complexity.
Some replies used the word “content” to describe the role that narrative plays. But I wouldn’t use the word content to describe varying feedback.
In other words, perverse as it may sound, I wouldn’t generally call chunks of story “game content.” But I would sometimes, and I’ll even offer up a game design here that does so.
The usual definition of “content” is “everything that isn’t code or rules,” meaning all the art and voiceovers and quests and whatnot. But that’s not what it means in this context, because we’re embarking on another one of thse annoyingly formalistic exercises here.
I have previously described the basic model I use for analyzing games formally as “a game grammar.” This was mostly a conceit for a presentation title, but in point of fact it fits the formal definition of “grammar” moderately well. You see, this model, which I have also termed an atomic model of game design, is concerned exactly with the morphology of games: the structure and form they take. It builds on the seminal work of Chris Crawford, who defined interaction as
a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak.
The game grammar model works the same way as all interaction does. The chief difference with game interaction is that one of those actors may actually be algorithmic: a computer, or a set of rules and processes. At core, a game is about figuring out the rules and processes that an opponent is using; said opponent might be a computer or a real person, or even the laws of physics and the physical constraints of your own body. Your job is to identify a goal (which might be handed to you by a designer, or might be one you set for yourself) and attempt to arrive at a way of interacting with this system that results in the outcome you want.
When we speak of a game system, that collection of rules is what we mean. Usually a system will be composed of multiple mechanics, each of which is made of up a variety of rules. A system like this has also been termed a “fun molecule,” an “atom” or a “ludeme” by various authors.
A system, though, is sort of like an algorithm, or a printing press. It repeatably performs a process, but given different stuff to work with, you can get a pretty different experience out of it. The term for the “stuff to work with” is content, and most of the time it is effectively “statistical variation.” An enemy with different stats, a level with different placement of platforms.
There is a class of games that focuses on user-generated narratives rather than on authorially imposed ones — you can read about the distinction in a very old talk called “Two Models for Narrative Worlds” I gave at the Annenberg Center at USC. In that talk I made the point that
These worlds can still tell stories. What we surrender is not narrative, but authorial control.
I coined the terms “impositional space” and “expressive space” to define the ends of this spectrum for myself.
Now, that talk long predates any of the game grammar sort of work. But effectively, my critique of quick-time-events and excess feedback used in narrative-driven games is primarily about impositional spaces, narrative imposed by the author(s) of the game; and it is essentially in a “ludic” context. And several folks took me to task for ignoring the expressive spaces and the spaces that are intended to serve as narrative generators in that critique.
Story, as it happens, has some rules too, largely based on how the brain works. For example, in The Art of Fiction John Gardner has a wonderful example of the ways in which repeated mention of physical objects causes them to become associated with emotions — in effect to become symbols. And then mention of objects associated with those objects does the same. In a sense, thematic freight becomes transitive.
That particular trick is used very very widely in all sorts of media. For example, Ravel’s Bolero has become thoroughly associated with sex thanks to the film 10, and now at this point you can conjure up that association by just playing that music.
Expressive spaces in games rely on this trick extensively. In fact, all forms of post facto storytelling by players do. They ascribe meaning to moments, and then the player builds a narrative arc through their selective memory of events. I often call this mythmaking, and we do it pretty much all the time, without even thinking about it.
In games designed to cause the player to put together stories, such as Sleep is Death, Facade, or Dear Esther, there is a system there, an algorithm — and then there is the statistical variation that is fed into it. And that statistical variation, the content, is actually little symbols and narrative moments, ones that are often impressionistic or disconnected. The “problem” the player faces is that of arranging them into a coherent whole.
The fact that symbols and moments and memories are profoundly intangible things does not mean that they can’t be manipulated in this way; fiction does so readily, as we have seen. From a mechanical point of view, though, they have much in common with the particular hand of cards you have been dealt, or the set of Scrabble tiles on your rack. You end your interaction with the system by making sense of them, which is different from finding a word in the tiles only by a matter of degree. Dear Esther‘s mechanics could be replicated with a different setting and group of symbols — to radically different emotional effect. When analyzed by the game grammar, we’d find two very different experiences to be the same game.
Let’s consider a thought experiment.
I was once in a discussion with some fellow designers and one of them was playing with the idea of a game about memories. I offered up a design idea whereby there was a map of a house, and there was a deck of cards, each card labelled things like “comfy armchair” and “deep closet” and “empty bookshelf.” The deck was shuffled, and some cards were laid in each room.
Players would then take turns tapping a card and telling a “memory” about that card and its place in that house. That this was the armchair where you remember curling up to read, a memory of safety and comfort; and another player says it was where they found great-grandmother when she finally passed away. All memories must be “true” — meaning, they cannot contradict anything anyone has said. After all stories were told, all the players decide which way they want to remember the armchair from among the stories told, by voting.
The person whose memory was selected keeps the card. At the end of the game, whoever has the most cards wins.
For greater emotional impact, you play this with real family, a real house layout, and real objects from your childhood.
Here we have both emergent consensus narrative and a game system. The memories are actually tokens in the game space — intangible ones, with a lot of emotional weight to them. You can approach the game mechanistically, and strategize. But you can also approach it experientially. It is mostly an expressive space. And ultimately, the real game lies in making sense of your family, its history. It is still pattern-matching, grokking each other and the complex web of relationships and half-truths and biased recollections that make up a family history.
In this game,
- narrative is input — the affordance given to a player, the “move they can make”
- narrative is a resource — accumulated and managed towards a victory condition
- narrative is actually content, user-generated even, providing statistical variation into the system
- narrative is feedback — its accumulation, in the form of individual symbols, is representing the gestalt “game state”
But it’s still not a mechanic. You could in fact replace the memories with differently colored poker chips, and everything would proceed in the same manner. The experience would be substantially different, and the emotional impact far less.
You could also de-game this. Don’t negotiate whose memories win out. Don’t have the rule about non-contradiction. You’d end up with the experience of looking through a photo scrapbook — and likely, you would not tackle the challenge of understanding that the rules push you towards.
This game has never been played. If anyone ever does, let me know what happens.
In the post title I said that narrative isn’t usually content. This game is an exception, as are the other ones I have cited. Ironically, games where narrative is content actually tend to have very very complex and robust rule systems. Chris Crawford’s Storytron has years of development in it, almost all in the systems design. Facade is an AI wonderment. And even this little non-digital game has as “imported” rules a host of psychology and past family history, rules that are deeply perilous to transgress. (The mere addition of other players always imports complex social rules into a game; in this case, the deeply personal nature of the interaction brings in yet more. “We never talk about her drinking problem” and the like).
Because of this, I have no issue reconciling formalism in examining the “ludology” of games with the “narratological” approach of examining games-as-stories. My issues with small-system-big-feedback games described in the other post have to do with the lack of substantive pattern-learning, the lack of player agency, and thus the lack of the fundamental qualities that games bring to the table. And in that, I include emergent-narrative games and expressive spaces, which I certainly consider games — more complex games, in point of fact, than most games are. So for those who felt I was bashing the entire genre of emergent narrative games, I apologize for the lack of clarity there; that was not at all where I was going with that post.
So where does this all leave authorially imposed story? Primarily in the realm of interactive experience design. Which is a different discipline from “game design” though they have tremendous overlap. I am biased towards our getting game design right, but that does not mean that interactive experience design isn’t a fascinating and deep area in its own right — or that it is unimportant to games. In fact, it’s incredibly important. But that’s a subject for another post someday.
from Raph’s Website
Rugby Film Highlights the Erosion of Women’s Rights in Iran
Women in Iran have it rough.
This wasn’t always the case – at least, not the way it is today. Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, most Iranian women didn’t wear veils. They were active in high levels of academia and government, so much so that even the conservative Revolution couldn’t completely erase their involvement. The civil law protected women’s rights, even when it contravened Sharia law to do so. There is a history, within living memory, of liberated women in Iran, and of a culture that fostered their liberation.
But since the Revolution, the rights of women have been slipping away. Faramarz Beheshti‘s 2010 film, Salam Rugby, stands as one more painful example.
In 2006, rugby was growing in popularity among women in Iran. Beheshti, through a friend in Iran’s Rugby Federation, became the official videographer for the women’s team. The title granted him access which would have been otherwise unattainable… just in time for the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Ahmadinejad’s regime initiated a crackdown on women’s sports. Beheshti’s documentary about empowerment quickly became a study in cultural and governmental oppression, as communities grew increasingly hostile to the team. Ultimately, the women’s rugby team was forced to disband, under allegations of immorality against the coach and in the face of increasingly draconian laws.
Beheshti discusses the struggles both he and the team faced over two and a half years of filming in a recent interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail. He makes it clear that many Iranians feel a sense of shame about the direction their country has gone – and rightly so. Fortunately, this exact sort of tension is what ultimately drives social change. Beheshti suspects his film will never be shown in Iran, but it still has the power to help make plenty of people plenty uncomfortable.
So far, I haven’t been able to find a way to watch or purchase the film in its entirety, though it was shown at ÉCU, The European Independent Film Festival. If I do, I’ll be sure to post it here. Sports are a venue for women to find community, confidence, and respect. The loss of the rugby team, and any of the other thousand tiny losses that women in Iran experience all the time, should not be taken quietly if we can help it.
from Friendly Atheist
The Zynga Abyss - Treating Video Game Players like rats in a Skinner Box.
from Hacker News
[Vocal Dubstep] Sub Focus – Falling Down
London based Subfocus has become a household name among electronic music lovers over the past few years due to his razor sharp production style and versatility behind the decks. Anyone who heard his debut self-titled EP in 2009 undoubtably recognized this young producer’s skills as he rose beyond the rigid format of Drum and Bass and began producing everything from electro to dubstep, all with a signature flavor all his own. And let’s not forget that the massive hit “Promises” made famous by Skrillex’s remixing skills was originally a production by Sub Focus and Nero. This month Sub Focus returns to the forefront of the dubstep scene with his new single “Falling Down”. Once again his exquisite taste for vocal hooks and ear stomping basslines takes Sub Focus’ tracks higher than the rest.
Sub Focus – Falling DownDownload audio file (Sub Focus – Falling Down.mp3)
from The Music Ninja
Small, Painful Buttons: Why Social Media Buttons Might be Killing Your Mobile Site
You build sites for mobile devices, right? Then you might’ve noticed the one pesky issue with responsive sites is the loading speed, especially when there’s a slow cell connection. What you may not know is that there is a likely culprit for at least part of your problem — the ever-present social media buttons.
On small devices, such as mobile phones, bandwidth and latency are at a premium. The response time from the server can compound over a cell connection and cause some serious delays. That coupled with a generally smaller bandwidth, we have to be very careful about how much weight we put on a page. Those tiny Tweet, Like, +1 buttons you see on websites are actually brutally large elements to load for these constrained devices. How brutal? Let’s take a look.
The Test
To test this, we created a very simple page with the three most commonly used social media buttons, embedded using the latest code from their vendors: Facebook’s “Like” button, with a small counter, Twitter’s “Tweet” button with a small counter, and Google’s “+1” button with a small counter.
We tested each of the three buttons by loading them individually and as a group. We also loaded them both as cached and completely uncached. Anything local for the page was directly on the testing device. To arrive at our calculations for mobile load time, we’re using an average of 100ms latency, based on the average latency of an iPhone 4S on Verizon 3G with full bars. LTE might be a bit faster … well, until your battery dies.
The Results
Let’s start with the really crazy stuff. To load the Facebook, Twitter and Google social media buttons for a total of 19 requests takes 246.7k in bandwidth. For perspective’s sake, that’s over twice the bandwidth and 3 times the number of requests required to load a complete, minified version of the entire Foundation framework. (Foundation packs down to about 113k, including images.)
Let’s take a second to just let that sink in. Holy crap. Look at this resources chart from Chrome:
The first three requests are for a local version of Foundation, and are cached.
On a desktop, over a good Wi-Fi connection, the uncached load of just those elements is about 2.3 seconds. That may seem fast, but consider that your entire Facebook stream probably loads about that fast. Now consider the latency of 19 requests over a 3G connection, maybe with a mediocre signal and a lot of dropped packets. Ouch!
The Breakdown
So who’s the worst offender of the big three when it comes to loading a button? Here’s the rundown of average load time, uncached and cached:
| Service | Uncached | Cached | Requests |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.91s | 0.8s | 5 | |
| 0.55s | 0.55s | 5 | |
| Google+ | 0.9s | 0.52s | 6 |
Twitter, despite gaining nothing from being cached, is still the overall fastest social media button to load. Facebook and Google+ are about the same the first time, but Facebook doesn’t gain much from caching whereas Google+ becomes about twice as fast.
The Solution
Don’t misread us, we not ready to say “ditch these buttons.” The fact these buttons can load as fast as they do based on a complex social graph is impressive. They are optimized. However, that optimization is often not enough for limited devices.
We also don’t want to downplay their utility — Facebook’s “Like” button is pretty handy, Twitter’s “Tweet” button fuels trends, and the Google+ “+1” button now apparently determines what we see when we search so that could turn out to be, you know…a pretty big deal.
That being said, it’s worthwhile to do something faster for mobile devices. The solution is actually pretty simple: each of these services still has a simple link to do what you want. Worst case, you have three images for the buttons, and that means three requests all off your server. No additional requests, no huge JS to parse, and no massive download. It’s not as sexy, sure. Users will have to load a second screen to take action, but at least you’re not punishing everyone in order to have this utility.
Here’s how simple the Facebook share URL is:
And here’s Twitter:
And finally, Google+:
Obviously, there is utility not represented with this option — it won’t add fans to your Facebook page the way the “Like” button does, or impact search like the “+1” button does, but it will create a faster, friendlier experience for the majority of your mobile visitors.
Have you seen other ubiquitous but glaring violations of mobile design? We’d love to hear about it, and what your solution is (or could be). Designing for arbitrary devices is still a bit of a minefield, but hopefully we’ll all pin this down together.
from ZURB
A client has various business areas which are identified by acronyms, including LAP, EQP and FAP….
A client has various business areas which are identified by acronyms, including LAP, EQP and FAP. They wanted some new online adverts made up. I asked what ideas they’d had for the text. This is what they came back with
FAP online (everyone is doing it)
FAP in schools
FAP for life.
from Clients From Hell
Ideas for movie moguls
President Obama asks that we suggest ways for the movie industry to control the Internet that we might not find so objectionable.
Nat Torkington tells an old joke in a new context. It’s a good one. God already gave the movie industry the Internet and it’s been shown you can make many billions of dollars selling things there. So why not sell movies too?
I think the President asks the wrong question.
What can the movie industry do to freshen up their product in the age of technology to make it more fun and interesting for their customers. Rather than try to destroy the new playground, how about coming out to play!
So here are some ideas.
1. The best suggestion I’ve heard is to make it impossible to use a cell phone or send or receive text messages in movie theaters. Just block the incoming signal. True, some people might stay home because they always want to be online, but I bet a lot more people would come back.
2. Work with Apple and others to emit a special “no alarms allowed” signal to be broadcast in the movie theater. That way the user doesn’t have to do anything to turn off the alarms. The owner of the venue could do it.
3. I find it’s hard to hear dialog sometimes in movies. Maybe it’s because my hearing isn’t so good. I like the sound systems they have. But I could use my mobile device and headphones to tune into an audio track that’s broadcast locally to those in the theater. Sure hackers could use this to get a great recording of the sound of the movie. So what. It would make the experience better for the people who pay. Those people are your customers.
4. Open the theaters to amateurs. Have contests for local creative movie people in your neighborhood. Have Saturday showing for the kids in your area. Get involved with your community. They could be a source of ideas. And we could find out where the great movies are coming from, geographically.
5. Why aren’t there cafes in the lobby of at least some theaters. Aren’t we always looking for a place for a snack or coffee after the movie? A place to talk about what we just saw with people we came with? Or a place to talk about the movies with people we saw it with. Instead they just move people in and out. Missed opportunity, imho.
6. Make the theaters more attractive and comfortable! Upgrade the experience. You’re competing against my home theater which isn’t really that great compared to the theater. But it is much more convenient.
7. Stretch the genres. So many of the movies are stupid rehashes of stories that weren’t that great in the first place. Movies like The Artist show that there are still a lot of ideas that are not fullly explored. Challenge the movie-makers to be more creative. I think that’s a big part of the problem.
8. Start a dating site based on people’s like and dislike of movies.
Anyway, just some ideas. Feel free to share your ideas in the comments.
