RainypixelsThe personal site of Nishant Kotharyhttp://rainypixels.com/words2015-07-16T22:00:00+05:30Nishant KotharyThe Dominey Effecthttp://rainypixels.com/words/love-the-web-learn-swift/2015-07-16T22:00:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>What drives us to learn? Often, it's seeing an incredible app or site and wanting to make something like it. Then, the next amazing thing takes us further along our learning journey. If you’re still learning today—and who isn’t—Nishant Kothary is nudging you to check out Swift, Apple’s open-source programming language. You might discover it’s a whole new way to love the web.</p>
<p><a href="http://alistapart.com/column/love-the-web-learn-swift">Read it on A List Apart →</a></p>
SHOUTERS, Inc.http://rainypixels.com/words/shouters-inc/2015-05-07T22:00:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>Sometimes, to make change happen, there has to be shouting. Other times, the shouting has to stop to allow change to happen. Right now we need to be talking—and listening—to each other, in our industry as well as in society. So why is it so hard to get these conversations going? Well, there’s the genuine guilt and anger that makes this super uncomfortable. On top of that, could it be we often lose our nerve at the prospect of feeding the indignation of the ALL-CAPS side of the internet? WAKE UP PEOPLE!</p>
<p><a href="http://alistapart.com/column/shouters-inc">Read it on A List Apart →</a></p>
There Is No Data vs. Intuitionhttp://rainypixels.com/words/there-is-no-data-vs-intuition/2015-03-12T22:00:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>Heads/Tails, Left/Right, Church/State, Engineering/Design, Logic/Emotion. Oh wait—the flipside of logic isn’t emotion. It’s fallacy. Another fallacy is feeling obliged to join either the faction of the sensibly-clad engineers or the faction of the crayon-toting creatives. Nishant Kothary has found that research is on the side of trusting your gut (then backing up your instinct with testing).</p>
<p><a href="http://alistapart.com/column/data-vs-intuition">Read it on A List Apart →</a></p>
Logically Speakinghttp://rainypixels.com/words/logically-speaking/2015-01-15T22:00:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>The human mind has its own logic far beyond the binary states of mere computers. Even in the tech industry, you can't escape the reality that it takes more than data and solid conclusions to win people over.</p>
<p><a href="http://alistapart.com/column/logically-speaking">Read it on A List Apart →</a></p>
The Politics of Feedbackhttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-politics-of-feedback/2014-08-16T22:00:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>We’re obsessive about collecting input from a wide range of potential users and stakeholders. But with such an onslaught of feedback, there’s always a risk of having your motivation and faith in humanity sucked right out of you. Sometimes, you just need calm critique from the few people who really get you. So which kind of feedback is best? The answer is both.</p>
<p><a href="http://alistapart.com/column/the-politics-of-feedback">Read it on A List Apart →</a></p>
Meow Means Woof In Cathttp://rainypixels.com/words/meow-means-woof-in-cat/2014-07-12T22:00:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>I was introduced to <a href="http://chloeweil.com/">Chloe</a> on Twitter by <a href="http://petragregorova.com/">Petra</a>. But it was <a href="http://chloeweil.com/blog/santa-claws">FACE</a>, Chloe's cat, that allowed me to really <em>meet</em> Chloe.</p>
<p>FACE wasn't just a cat. He was responsible for a large part of Chloe's identity. Chloe referred to herself as his protégé . This sounds alien to most people. Weird, even. But it made more sense to me than most things in life.</p>
<p>Common interests have brought me together with many, but my strongest bonds remain with people whom the world at large would accuse of being obsessed with their pets. I think it's because those relationships have a strikingly childlike innocence. They effortlessly transcend all the inflammatory neocortical noise generated in maintaining your position in society as a respectable adult. Judgements are dropped, agendas are shoved aside. They're replaced with the shared awe that two different species can be so connected despite the language barriers.</p>
<p>Chloe wasn't afraid of being seen as a crazy cat lady. Her <a href="http://instagram.com/youngdaiquiri">Instagram bio</a> proudly warned, "Get ready for cat photos." And when she realized that I was a crazy dog guy with an Instagram feed entirely dedicated to Yoshi, my Weimaraner, she exposed her true nature in a way that only a crazy animal person will appreciate.</p>
<p>One day, out of the blue, I got a notification that someone mentioned me on Instagram. When I went to the post, I realized it was the same Chloe from Twitter who'd tagged me. She'd been browsing Instagram's news feed when she happened to discover that I have an incorrigible habit of stalking and liking pictures of random dogs and cats on Instagram. She took a screenshot of my latest activity, and <a href="http://instagram.com/p/on4aU">posted it as a picture</a> to her own feed with the caption, "@rainypixels is awesome." That's crazy animal lover speak for, "Hey, I'm one of you!"</p>
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<p>By the time we met in person when she was visiting Seattle, we knew each other's pet companions frighteningly well. We sat next to each other at a geek dinner I'd hosted for a visiting conference, and while everyone else talked tech, Chloe and I spent the entire dinner sharing stories and pictures about Yoshi and FACE. We were like two kids in a petting zoo.</p>
<p>Chloe passed away last week, and like <a href="http://petragregorova.com/articles/chloe/">Petra</a>, <a href="http://adactio.com/journal/7030/">Jeremy</a>, and <a href="http://adactio.com/links/tags/chloeweil">so many others</a> have written, it's really hard to believe. I fall into the group of people who didn't know Chloe very well outside of our frequent online banter that was catalyzed by our beloved furry companions. But at the same time, I can't discount how well I felt I knew her precisely because of that limited, but profound shared context. It feels like I have lost one of my own.</p>
<p>RIP, Chloe.</p>
In Pursuit of Facebook Happinesshttp://rainypixels.com/words/in-pursuit-of-facebook-happiness/2014-07-03T22:00:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>Long overdue piece for my A List Apart column. This one is about Facebook, too. I may be obsessed.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the motivations for Facebook's controversial study was to debunk the notion that seeing our friends' happy posts in our news feeds actually makes us sadder. And according to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/akramer/posts/10152987150867796">a post by Adam Kramer</a>, the primary author of the study, it did exactly that, "We found the exact opposite to what was then the conventional wisdom: Seeing a certain kind of emotion (positive) encourages it rather than suppresses is."</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>But, how profound is this effect on users' overall enjoyment while they're using Facebook? That remains unknown, and in my experience, it's not much at all.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://alistapart.com/column/in-pursuit-of-facebook-happiness">Read it on A List Apart →</a></p>
Hatershttp://rainypixels.com/words/haters/2014-02-11T21:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p class="editors-note">My wife, <a href="http://twitter.com/thatpita">Pita</a>, wrote this piece in September 2013 right after <a href="http://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/60336044815/geeking-out-on-the-logo">Yahoo! redesigned their logo</a>. I urged her to start a blog but she wasn't interested in doing so at the time. Then a couple of days ago, almost five months after she wrote it, I found it on my hard drive. A criticism on criticisms, it's relevant even today despite the Yahoo! logo redesign being well behind us. I convinced her to let me publish it here. The best part is that we met exactly seven years ago today.</p>
<p>Too often when I read something about recent events on the Internet, be it on a news site, someone’s blog, or a shared writing space like Medium, my takeaway is, “Well, Haters gonna hate”. The fact that supposedly cerebral writing gets reduced in my mind to a hip-hop catch phrase depresses me. Since the Yahoo! logo redesign is a hot topic on the Web right now, I’m going to use it as the example to explain myself.</p>
<h1 id="mo-facts-mo-problems">Mo Facts, Mo Problems</h1>
<p>Long ago, someone told me, “Everything is arbitrary”. I didn’t exactly understand what they were talking about at the time, nor will I pretend to now. But I often think about that phrase. I have come to associate it with the practice of debate, and have learned over time that almost any opinion can be defended, especially if the debater chooses the right subset of facts to embed in his argument.</p>
<p>It is along these lines that I have observed that one's preferences get little to no respect on the Internet. And as a result, writers are fearful of sharing theirs. Not only do we often feel like we need to justify our preferences, but we have so much pressure to show that they are <em>right</em>, instead of just being the likes and dislikes that they are. Yes, I may have three facts that show that my opinion is the right one to hold, but I obviously hand-picked them. Someone else will soon write a counter post with three different points that show that my opinion is wrong.</p>
<p>In reality, our opinions are rarely fact—heck, <a href="http://www.arbesman.net/the-half-life-of-facts/">most facts don’t stand the test of time</a>—which means that their correctness is irrelevant. Our opinions are usually just based on our preferences, and a couple of things we may have been exposed to along the way.</p>
<p>It feels like we have lost the ability to look at the big picture: to understand the main point of a piece of writing. In a world where we can fact-check most information in a few minutes, we’ve become terrified of agreeing with something (the main point of a piece of writing) without talking about how wrong the rest is (less important points). And the knowledge that other people will analyze us in the same way, drives us to fill our own articles, blog posts, and comments with preemptive safeguards and, of course, “facts”.</p>
<h1 id="are-we-a-bunch-of-yahoos">Are We A Bunch of Yahoos?</h1>
<p>The point of <a href="http://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/60336044815/geeking-out-on-the-logo">Marissa Mayer’s Tumblr post</a> was: we redesigned our logo, we listened to our employees, and as CEO, I care about design. What Mayer was trying to do with her post was share and be transparent. She was trying to connect with people who care about logos, brand, and design. And she was also trying to take some credit for the effort because:</p>
<ol>
<li>People like seeing an “active” CEO, especially when they lead Internet companies</li>
<li>Ambitious type-A people like talking about their accomplishments; it makes them happy</li>
</ol>
<p>Unfortunately, her post read as, “Hey Designers, I am a controlling micromanager, and can do your job in a weekend!” From my perspective, it was an obvious PR gaffe. I don’t know Mayer personally, but I bet she didn’t mean to imply this. I doubt that she would have <em>intentionally</em> made such a bad PR move.</p>
<p>But let’s suppose for a second that it wasn’t a PR SNAFU. That she believes every word she wrote, and is intoxicated by her own greatness.</p>
<p>Who cares? Seriously.</p>
<p>Even if Mayer is an arrogant asshole (and to be clear, I’m not saying that she is or isn’t, as I do not know her), how would that make her any different from many other powerful and successful people? Why does she have more pressure to be a role model and an all-star human being than Sergey Brin, Bill Clinton, or even Steve Jobs did when he was alive?</p>
<p>If Yahoo! had just issued a corporate press release or made the logo change quietly, we probably would have lambasted Mayer for not being transparent or “clear about her strategy”. Deep down we know that she was fucked if she did, and fucked if she didn’t.</p>
<p>The thing that kills me the most is that we are not consistent with our judgements. Also, I cannot help but feel that she isn’t being judged by her outcomes, rather by her gender. Sure, trailblazers will always get picked on. It’s the price that they pay for being ambitious enough to go first, but let’s at least admit to what we’re doing.</p>
<p>Bottom-line: Mayer should be judged for how she improves Yahoo in the long run, not for how much humility she demonstrates.</p>
<h1 id="dont-hate-the-player-hate-the-game">Don’t Hate The Player, Hate the Game</h1>
<p>In-person discussions have a back and forth flow where we take turns giving each other the floor. We are not forced to provide all our supporting facts and points up front. We get to learn from each other along the way. And, while these discussions can get heated, they are generally healthy.</p>
<p>On the Internet, however, we send our opinions into a void, hope for a reply, and pray that what comes back won’t be humiliating. So to hedge our bets, we actually take our preference or belief, wrap it in handpicked “facts” and rebrand our opinion as “the right answer”. We force ourselves to strongly commit to a side in order to participate in the conversation. And this often leads to writings that are much more strongly worded than the author ever intended. And, the result is often a less civil, nuanced, and productive conversation.</p>
<p>Perhaps we have always been like this, and that what we see on the Web is part and parcel of human socialization. Then again, I can’t help but wonder if it is the immediacy of the Internet with real-time access to an audience is what drives us to move faster and protect ourselves more forcefully.</p>
<p>So, here’s my 2¢.</p>
<p>I like the new Yahoo logo. It feels grown up and confident, but also “sweet”. I am female, in my 30s, married with animals, college educated, work in technology, a child of immigrants, and I live in the Northwest. If those demographics are important, there you have them. The new logo works for me.</p>
<p>I am entitled to my opinion, and I am entitled to debate it. But, I am not entitled to pass it off as fact.</p>
The Real Problem With Facebookhttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-real-real-problem-with-facebook/2014-01-09T22:00:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>Another installment of my A List Apart column. This one's about the problem with Facebook:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the spirit of the new year’s resolution many of us likely made—<em>spend less time on Facebook</em>—it may be time to go beyond the symptoms to understand a deeper issue behind much of our Facebook angst.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://alistapart.com/column/the-real-real-problem-with-facebook">Read it on A List Apart →</a></p>
Coinfectionhttp://rainypixels.com/words/coinfection/2013-11-14T19:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p><a href="https://onlycoin.com/">Coin</a> has been the talk of Twitter today.</p>
<p>It's a card that replaces all the cards we carry in our wallets and purses. That's right: one card to replace all your credit, debit, membership, gift, and loyalty cards. Our shared dream has been realized.</p>
<figure class="center m">
<img src="/img/words/coinfection.jpg" alt="Coin" title="Coin" />
</figure>
<p>In a moment of spontaneity, I bought two: one for my wife, and one for myself. I bought them within a minute of seeing a tweet about it. I hadn't even made my way through the entire product video before the dope in my brain commanded my fingers to execute the transaction. Ironically, I used the credit card and identity stored in my <a href="https://agilebits.com/onepassword">1Password</a> app to fill out the form.</p>
<p>Impulse buy: check and mate.</p>
<p>Upon regaining consciousness, my neocortex noticed this tweet from <a href="http://www.twitter.com/mims">@mims</a> —</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>Coin, the latest clever payment system, shows that digital wallets remain a terrible idea <a href="http://t.co/Kq9ffK5ZsP">http://t.co/Kq9ffK5ZsP</a></p>— Christopher Mims (@mims) <a href="https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/401069112807661568">November 14, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>I read his piece (you should, too). In a nutshell, the Coin relies on being in the vicinity of your mobile phone to remain activated, writes @mims.</p>
<p>The possibility of my Coin getting deactivated due to failed pings to my phone is a deal-breaker, concluded <a href="http://alistapart.com/column/the-monster-within-us">the monster within me</a>. It would mean that I'd need to carry the three cards I always carry: my preferred American Express credit card (which is not accepted by tons of merchants), my Visa credit card (this is my backup card, but it has a credit limit and can't be used to withdraw cash in emergencies), and my Mastercard debit card (my true emergency card; really, this is just "cash").</p>
<p>My brain started twitching madly for having spent a $100 bucks. Soon my fingers typed this —</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-cards="hidden"><p>I bought a Coin, but this little bit of investigative journalism by <a href="https://twitter.com/mims">@mims</a> makes me immediately regret the purchase — <a href="http://t.co/hvVthFJ4Tu">http://t.co/hvVthFJ4Tu</a></p>— Nishant Kothary (@rainypixels) <a href="https://twitter.com/rainypixels/statuses/401071179441504256">November 14, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>It wasn't meant to damn the Coin, though. Read it slowly.</p>
<p>But tweets are damned to be damning. And they can be notoriously infectious. Dissent, commiseration, snark, disappointment, and misinformation followed. Fortunately, I don't have the klout of a Kardashian, and this enabled the wound to cauterize quickly. But, some damage was done.</p>
<p>I've spent the last couple of hours reading about Coin between programming breaks. Verge has a <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/14/5103820/coin-electronic-card-to-hold-all-your-credit-cards">good piece</a> (one that @mims himself linked to but I conveniently ignored in the euphoria of all my #firstworld dreams being realized). It says that the Coin's CEO, Kanishk Parashar, has yet to determine whether the Coin will take a dependency on your cell phone to remain activated. The Coin <a href="https://onlycoin.com/support/faq/">FAQ's</a> section itself is vague about the dependency.</p>
<p>I have other problems with it, though. The Coin can only store 8 cards. It isn't water-proof (just resistant). It may not be able to sustain the pressure of me sitting on it with my generous badonkadonk. It has to be replaced after two years because that's how long its battery lasts. Wait, so do I need to spend another $100 to replace my Coins?!</p>
<p>Nits aside, much about the Coin remains unknown. Our brains are doing fabulous jobs of filling in the gaps using our own biases. And that is totally OK.</p>
<p>To speak, tweet, or buy before reading is not, though. And I regret the part I played in that today.</p>
The Monster Within Ushttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-monster-within-us/2013-10-31T19:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>The halloween special edition of my <em>A List Apart</em> column, and it's about the scary monster within our brains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I recently learned that the phrase “trick or treat” is short for “Give me a treat or I will play a trick on you.” It’s actually a threat. It also happens to be a frighteningly good metaphor for how our brains work. “Give me short-term gratification, or I will make your life miserable!” is the brain’s modus operandi as it communicates with itself to help us live our lives.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://alistapart.com/column/the-monster-within-us">Read it on A List Apart →</a></p>
The Merry Stormtrooperhttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-merry-stormtrooper/2013-09-05T15:02:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>The second installment of my <em>A List Apart</em> column. In case you missed it, it's worth reading <a href="http://alistapart.com/column/it-is-what-it-is">the first one</a> to establish some continuity. This next one is about finding happiness in shitty jobs and situations. And, coping with the scars of past loves:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was SXSW 2009, and I’d just bumped into someone I dated in college. This was the first time we’d seen each other since our breakup. As often happens in such situations, the uncomfortable exchange had come down to one question: whose life was better?</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://alistapart.com/column/the-merry-stormtrooper">Read it on A List Apart →</a></p>
It Is What It Ishttp://rainypixels.com/words/it-is-what-it-is/2013-06-28T08:08:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>This is the first installment of <a href="http://alistapart.com/columns">my new column on A List Apart</a>. We're calling it <em>The Human Web</em>. Here's an excerpt:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We found that I wanted to write about minimizing our time as <em>Victims</em>, becoming comfortable with spending most of our time as <em>Apprentices</em>, and relishing the few moments we’ll spend as <em>Masters</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://alistapart.com/column/it-is-what-it-is">Read it on A List Apart →</a></p>
The Myth of Perfecthttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-myth-of-perfect/2013-03-27T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>I <a href="http://rainypixels.com/words/gray-matters/">recently left Microsoft</a> to start a company named <a href="http://weareminky.com">Minky</a> with my wife, Pita. We never planned on doing client work but when my ex-manager and champion of good things at Microsoft, <a href="http://about.me/JeffSandquist">Jeff Sandquist</a>, invited me to come on board to help design the Build 2013 experience, I, or should I say, Minky, couldn't resist. Having collaborated on <a href="http://rainypixels.com/words/build-it-fast/">the creative for the 2012 conference</a> with the <a href="http://paravelinc.com">3 amigos</a> and Jeff, I was excited at the prospect of helping evolve the Build brand.</p>
<figure class="center l">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/logo-build-big.png" alt="Build logo" title="Build logo" />
</figure>
<p>Yesterday marked the launch of <a href="http://buildwindows.com/announcement">a simple, one-page announcement site for Build 2013</a> that Minky helped design and build in approximately a week. The concept relied on faking masks in the browser to reveal parts of an underlying image as the user scrolled. With weak browser support for masks, the task proved to be particularly tricky to implement responsively across the target browser stack because of known <a href="http://css-tricks.com/percentage-bugs-in-webkit/o">sub-pixel rendering issues using percentages in Webkit browsers</a> (let's save that for another day). All in all, despite the apparent simplicity of the design, it turned out to be terrifying to pull off.</p>
<figure class="center xl">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/concept.jpg" alt="Wireframe to completed design" title="Wireframe to completed design" />
<figcaption>left to right: early wireframe concept created by Pita; top third of final site; middle third; bottom third<br/><a href="http://buildwindows.com/announcement">Visit the Build 2013 site →</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What you might not have guessed, though, is that most of my fear was grounded <em>not</em> in my ability to actually implement the design successfully, rather my ability to implement it while hitting the invisible but omnipresent <em>bar of perfection</em> — the eternally moving target characterized by an elusive set of front-end development best practices and techniques — we set for ourselves as web designers.</p>
<p>So, let's talk about perfection.</p>
<h1>Peerfection</h1>
<p>Frank Chimero recently tweeted —</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>My favorite feature of the web is View Source.</p>— Frank Chimero (@fchimero) <a href="https://twitter.com/fchimero/statuses/314749528928550912">March 21, 2013</a></blockquote>
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<!-- <blockquote><p>My favorite feature of the Web is View Source.</p></blockquote> -->
<p>Indeed, I couldn't agree more. But there's a downside captured by another tweet by a friend, Susan Robertson —</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>As I'm doing this responsive design I worry I'm doing it wrong and anyone who looks at the source will laugh - this stuff is hard.</p>— Susan Robertson (@susanjrobertson) <a href="https://twitter.com/susanjrobertson/statuses/218093668622548992">June 27, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<!-- <blockquote><p>As I'm doing this responsive design I worry I'm doing it wrong and anyone who looks at the source will laugh - this stuff is hard.</p></blockquote> -->
<p>For front-end web developers, the sentiment captured by her tweet and the typically resulting sensation of uneasiness should be a familiar one. The one very unique aspect of front-end web development as compared to the rest of software development is that the code you write is literally one right-click away from anyone who wants to see it (and let's face it, that's the first thing we do to each other's sites).</p>
<p>While we take much pride in the craft of our professions, it causes a level of anxiety similar to what many of us feel on stage while hundreds of pairs of eyes are staring at us. Susan Cain in her book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352145">Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking</a> —</p>
<blockquote><p>One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we're about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run.</p></blockquote>
<p>The thought of peers viewing our source causes our reptilian brain to voice a tiny question that inevitably turns into a shrieking echo by the time we approach the finish line —
<blockquote><p>Will my code hit the bar of perfection?</p></blockquote>
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<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/sachertorte.jpg" alt="Sachertorte" title="Sachertorte" width="500px" />
<figcaption>Sachertorte aka perfection. image credit: <a href="http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Austria/East/Vienna/Vienna/photo767118.htm">TrekEarth</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="http://dcurt.is/the-best">Dustin Curtis' piece</a> captures our innate, often bordering insane, tendency to seek the best, i.e. the perfect. We've all felt that way about something or someone at one point or the other in our lives. To me (I write this right after my recent two week eastern European vacation), perfection is like that first bite of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachertorte">Sachertorte</a> served to you in a café perched on a cliff with a breathtaking view of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgangsee">Wolfgangsee</a>. But, I know that not everyone shares my view. Certainly not my wife. She'd much prefer some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_strudel">Apple Strudel</a>. And, to even approach perfection it'd need to be served with some vanilla ice cream and a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_Melange">Melange</a>. Really, if you were to press her, she'd admit that the final ingredients would also involve a soft, freshly laundered blanket and a Weimaraner to cuddle with.</p>
<p>We've made peace at some level with the notion that our tastes are subjective, a topic that I've written about both <a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Designers-Be-Happy-Youre-Not-Dolphins">here</a> and <a href="http://uxmag.com/articles/predictable-design">here</a> in the past. Tastes differ from person to person. And we acknowledge that when it comes to tastes, it isn't a matter of absolute wrong or right, rather of what's right for <em>me</em>. Seemingly conflicting tastes can thus co-exist in a world where even as we mock each others' tastes, often tastelessly, we strive to accept, as Jakob Von Uexküll infamously dubbed it, each others' <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt">umwelts</a></em>. </p>
<p>But when the conversation turns to anything that could be remotely be considered through an objective lens, or more accurately, as having the possibility of one <em>right</em> answer — beauty, logic, mathematics, politics, religion, music, and literally everything in the world including our beloved front-end web development practices actually fits this bill — all bets are off, we say. As irony would have it, for anything you that you think may be judged only subjectively, there are usually at least two people who believe the opposite: that objective reasoning may be applied to that context to reap the only right, i.e. perfect, answer. And all of a sudden, we're not talking about tastes or sophisticated choices anymore, but facts — cold, hard, statistical, empirically reproducible laws of nature — and we're ready to battle it out with theorems, axioms, rules, laws, and best practices.</p>
<p>But could it be that even the facts we embrace and the sciences we worship often need to be measured, much like taste, in relatives rather than absolutes? Could it be that our facts, in the right light, much like our tastes, are imperfect? </p>
<h1>Let's Russell Some Feathers</h1>
<p>Back in the early 1900's, there was a mathematician by the name of Bertrand Russell best known for having discovered a mathematical paradox. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_paradox">Russell's Paradox</a> is best explained by an excerpt from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fermats-Enigma-Greatest-Mathematical-Problem/dp/0385493622">Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem</a> by Simon Singh:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Russell's paradox is often explained using the tale of the meticulous librarian. One day, while wandering between the shelves, the librarian discovers a collection of catalogues. There are separate catalogues for novels, reference, poetry, and so on. The librarian notices that some of the catalogues list themselves, while others do not.</p>
<p>In order to simplify the system the librarian makes two more catalogues, one of which lists all the catalogues which do list themselves and, more interestingly, one which lists all the catalogues which do not list themselves. Upon completing the task the librarian has a problem: should the catalogue which lists all the catalogues which do not list themselves, be listed in itself? If it is listed, then by definition, it should not be listed. However, if it is not listed, then by definition it should be listed. The librarian is in a no-win situation.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="right sm">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/fermat.jpg" alt="Fermat" title="Fermat" />
<figcaption>Fermat's Enigma</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Russell's paradox lay the groundwork for publication of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems">Kurt Gödel's Theorems of Undecidability</a> in 1931. Gödel's theorems proved without doubt that Mathematics as it existed then (and today) could never be logically perfect. Until then (and even in many circles today) Mathematics was heralded as the only logically consistent science there was — the only surety, or as it were, "perfection", in a world full of subjective flip-flopping. But Gödel's theorems pretty much butchered that sacred cow.</p>
<p>The fact that mathematics has massive holes at an axiomatic level is hardly astonishing, though. After all, the history of not just maths, but all sciences is rampant with examples of error, gaps, contradictions, and embarrassing gaffes. Pluto recently losing its planetary status, the recent financial crisis exposing the fragility of the rational model of economics, the use of lobotomies to cure psychological illnesses, the absence of the zero in mathematics for centuries, doctors prescribing low-fat/high-carb diets to diabetic baby boomers, the hypothesis that prevailed for centuries that the earth was flat: each generation provides ripe material to the standup comedy amateur night that is our collective scientific stage.</p>
<p>This is not to say that all things in the universe are arbitrary, that there are no truisms, or that everything that is right today will actually be proven wrong in the future. Rather, it is our ability to identify truisms accurately that we must question constantly, not just for topics entirely unfamiliar to us like mathematical axioms, but for the very topics that are most familiar to us. </p>
<p>Indeed, and we know this deep down, our fallibility is most tested and exposed when we're in our comfort zones.</p>
<h1>History Repeats Itself</h1>
<p>There are a tremendous number of patterns and practices that we employ today as web designers and developers that we collectively saw as absolutely wrong a few years ago and will likely see as wrong at some point in the near future. Or, as several characters repeated in Battlestar Galactica, "All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again."</p>
<p>Take the phenomenon in the golden age of Flash where "immersive experiences" took over the browser viewport and presented users with "highly interactive" (but generally unintuitive) experiences where straightforward ones were really best suited for the job. Ask anyone who "did Flash" in the early 2000's and they'll tell you that we're back in those days, but this time with HTML5. <a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Article-vs-Section-Weve-Finally-Gone-Mad">An issue I took</a> with the introduction of the redundant <code><article></code> and <code><section></code> tags a few years ago, <a href="http://adactio.com/journal/1654/">a torch first carried</a> by our very own defender of that which is sensible, Jeremy Keith, is another case in point that brings back memories of cyclical contradictions in the ongoing standardization processes. The <a href="http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/02/the_vendor_pref.html">flip-flopping around the use of vendor prefixes</a> to utilize proprietary browser features, many of which were/are not only non-normative but far from being introduced for standardization, is another outrageous case in point and repetition of history. The "works best in Chrome" phenomenon, the comeback of the formerly frowned upon practice of using divs for marking up our grids, the cyclical CSS architecture debate, ... — "All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again." Heck, <a href="http://www.webdirections.org/blog/the-proof-of-the-pudding/">even the social issues</a> in our industry continue to play like a broken record.</p>
<p>I suspect Russell, Gödel, and our favorite Galactica characters would all agree on one thing if they were in our industry: front-end web development and aspirations of code perfection are fundamentally incompatible. While it takes hundreds of years for Mathematics, unarguably the most logical field in the world even if not perfect, to change at a fundamental level, the Web counts in months, even days at times. And when it comes to the profession of a web developer, perfection of the craft itself is so much of a moving target that bending over backwards to write the most elegant code to solve a problem or trying to keep up with the latest best practices, while addictive the same way competing in triathlons is addictive, can ultimately be sabotaging, both to the user experience and to the morale of the developer.</p>
<p>But good luck convincing our brains of that, right? My hand is literally twitching to type a rebuttal at this very instant about how a laser focus on perfection of the craft doesn't take away from delivering the best user experience, rather it enables it. But that post has already been written a few thousand times over, so to my dear amygdala, I say: Relax! </p>
<p>Even if the wisdom of Nobel prize winning mathematicians and badass Cylon enigmas don't do much to convince us, we should be able to find some solitude in the infinite wisdom of one of our own, <a href="http://thegreatdiscontent.com/trent-walton">Trent Walton</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>I think there’s some value in realizing that most of the world doesn’t give two shits about what we do during the day…it reminds me not to take things too seriously and also not to worry about what anyone else thinks.</p></blockquote>
<p>Touché, my amigo. Maybe we'll never convince ourselves to stop looking for the princess in the castle. Maybe what we really need to work on is realizing that there is no castle.</p>
Gray Mattershttp://rainypixels.com/words/gray-matters/2012-12-19T13:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>I have decided to leave Microsoft and go out on my own. </p>
<p>I'm interested in building a product and I've registered <a href="http://weareminky.com">Minky</a> to help me do that. Honestly, that's all I've got right now. </p>
<p>Really, I want to talk about Microsoft today. Leaving a company after 5 years is a big deal. We spend more time at work than we do with family and friends. Leaving without saying a word just feels wrong. </p>
<p>So, here goes. </p>
<p>If you've read <a href="http://rainypixels.com/words">anything I've written</a> in the past couple of years (or have recently attended one of my talks), you probably already know that I'm somewhat obsessed with topics related to the brain. I tend to spend a lot of my free time reading about error analysis, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and the likes. I've even shared <a href="http://www.rainypixels.com/thereadinglist">a reading list</a> to that end with you in the past. </p>
<p>There was one particular study I came across a few years ago in a book by Kathryn Schulz, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Being-Wrong-Adventures-Margin-Error/dp/0061176052">Being Wrong</a>, that changed how I think at a foundational level. The study, known as the <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=7yLl11fWXr8C&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=sally-anne+test+3+year+olds&source=bl&ots=ddGYQ-xXC8&sig=_2e3xX1eVd0Y_lxTRiCQTzh4pLU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PWrOUJiQG4vYigLV74GIBA&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=sally-anne%20test%203%20year%20olds&f=false">Sally-Anne Test</a>, remains one of the most cited — and in the context of autism, still fairly controversial — developmental psychology studies in existence. </p>
<p>The Sally-Anne test is administered to children between the ages of three and four. It involves staging a simple puppet show involving two characters, Sally and Anne. Sally places a marble in a basket, closes its lid and leaves the room. Shortly thereafter, the very naughty Anne, enters the scene, flips open the lid of the basket, pulls out the marble and places it in a box sitting in the corner. Now, the child who has witnessed all of this, is asked a simple question —</p>
<blockquote><p>When Sally returns, where will she look for the marble? </p></blockquote>
<p>Almost every child in this age group exclaims with confidence, "In the box!" This answer is baffling to adults for the obvious reason: there's no way Sally could have known that the marble was mischievously displaced by Anne because Sally wasn't around to witness that. But the children don't care about this detail. To them, reality and their minds' representations of reality are one and the same. Sally thinks the marble is in the box because, well, it <em>is</em> in the box. </p>
<p>The children provide an incorrect answer because they have yet to develop what is known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind">representational theory of mind</a>, what is considered a key differentiating feature of human beings as compared to most other mammals. Theory of mind is what bestows upon us the knowledge that our mind's version of reality isn't true reality, but an interpretation of reality. Furthermore, it gives us the knowledge that everybody has their own mind and thus, their own reality. </p>
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<p>But what, pray, does this have to do with my departure from Microsoft? It's a good question and one I will answer with another question — </p>
<blockquote><p>What is the most important thing I am taking away from Microsoft?</p></blockquote>
<p>Turns out that that's the $64,000 question you have to answer for yourself when you spend approximately 10,000 hours of your life working at a company. </p>
<p>10,000 hours. Wow. </p>
<p>I came to Microsoft because I was (and still am) interested in designing and building software products. I joined the company fresh out of a two-year stint as a Program Manager at Amazon, the brunt of which was spent surviving an epic death march towards the launch of Amazon's 35th product category: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Instant-Video/b?ie=UTF8&node=2858778011">Instant Video</a> (<a href="http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=971365&highlight=">back then known as Unbox</a>). It's easier to recount what went well on that project because there wasn't much. Upon shipping the first version over a year behind schedule — a schedule that was my responsibility, but mostly out of my control, I might add — over 90% of the team quit not just the Unbox team, but the company. I was one such statistic as well. </p>
<p>Now, if you were to ask me to list the causes for the failure that was the initial product, the response would have been at the tip of my tongue. I'd have immediately furnished you with an exhaustive list: weak product vision, collective lack of engineering and design experience, lack of process, competing political agendas, lack of leadership, too many cross-functional dependencies, and so on. Simply put, I'd have painted you a picture of what we fondly refer to in the industry as a <em>clusterfuck</em>. </p>
<p>Speaking of, one of my first projects at Microsoft was <a href="http://visitmix.com/work/descry/awebsitenameddesire/">A Website Named Desire</a>. A colleague of mine, Erik Saltwell, and I came up with this idea for a poster that illustrates what goes into getting a web application off the ground. It was based on some fantastic research Erik had done for the now discontinued <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Expression_Web">Expression Web</a>. We hired <a href="http://xplane.com/">XPlane</a> to help us realize our vision: one that took hundreds of painstaking hours of illustration and creative reviews. </p>
<figure class="center xl">
<a href="http://rainypixels.com/v3/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/awnd.pdf"><img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/awnd_small_cut.jpg" alt="A Website Named Desire" title="A Website Named Desire" /></a>
<figcaption><a href="http://visitmix.com/work/descry/awebsitenameddesire/">A Website Named Desire</a>: A piece illustrating what it takes to get a web site off the ground. Click image above to zoom (.pdf).</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our goal was to illustrate the typical software product development cycle in practice — non-linear, highly chaotic, angst ridden, tear-jerking — in stark contrast to the apparently neat, linear, and highly theoretical ones typically presented in software project management literature. Actually, if you follow the project manager in the poster (hint: she's the one with a little progress indicator next to her head and a look of perpetual resignation on her face), you will see the theoretical linearity of the process hidden in the chaos. </p>
<p>A Website Named Desire turned out to be a hit campaign. We printed and distributed over 10,000 posters, and I like to think it was a hit because most people who saw it instantly related to the picture of dysfunction it painted. But as good as the poster was at illustrating the "how" and the "what", it barely scratched the surface of "why". Why is the act of building software — and more importantly, life itself — often such a clusterfuck?</p>
<p>Pretty much everything we need to know about the root causes of, not just software project failures but most failures in life, can be traced back to the Sally-Anne test. As we get older we develop and refine our theory of mind allowing us to understand and deconstruct extremely complicated situations. And with a little help from our friends like mirror neurons, we are literally able to feel what others feel. Even when we are convinced about something, we acknowledge that the conviction may not be a fact. Nothing illustrates this aspect of our existence better than the adage, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"</p>
<p>But this doesn't stop us from having very strong convictions. And our ability to be <em>fully convinced about something</em> while acknowledging our own fallibility at judging <em>anything</em> is an elegant imperfection that suspends us in a confusing duality — we know that we can't know anything with 100% certainty, except certain things are 100% certain to us. It is a duality that escapes our consciousness most of the time because our sanity depends on it.</p>
<p>It is why we know that murder is always wrong. Or that Microsoft is evil while Google isn't. Or that banning same-sex marriages is the will of the Almighty. Or that JavaScript programmers aren't real programmers. Or that the right to bear arms is at the root of violent crimes. Or that ______ is smart/good/wise/credible/trustworthy and ______ isn't. Or that racism or sexism don't exist. Or that Instagram made a deal with the devil. Or that some of us are born into a lower caste than others. Or that Apple is perfect. </p>
<p>Our list of views is endless, and what's more is that for every view we hold, there's someone who holds an opposing view with the same level of conviction. And collectively, our views cancel out and we fail the Sally-Anne test much like our toddler selves: a hypothesis that may as well be a binding law of physics at this point thanks to the work of folks like <a href="http://danariely.com/">Dan Ariely</a> and many before him. </p>
<p>So where does this leave us? Actually, where does this leave me in relation to my most important takeaway from 10,000 hours spent at Microsoft? OK, I'll spit it out now.</p>
<p>Certainly, I learned a tremendous amount about how (and how not to) design, build, ship, and market software products. If my <a href="http://rainypixels.com/work">Work page</a> is any indication, I acquired a boatload of new skills and got to practice honing others. But I got much of that at Amazon, too, and it's something one would expect from most decent jobs. What was different is that — through the sheer act of finding a voice at a controversial company like Microsoft with millions of customers, fans, and critics — I stumbled upon the most important aspect of building products: people. And not in that awfully tired way repeated by folks who talk about how "it's all about the people" but never really practice it. I realized it in the kind of way that I can only compare to the final scene of the Matrix where Neo sees the agents as strings of code. </p>
<p>This is not to say that I can fly around the Matrix and bend will. Rather, it's that I can see and understand things that escaped me years ago when I was at Amazon. I was convinced of the causes that led to the failures of Unbox. But in hindsight, they were merely symptoms of other, more elusive root causes. Now, if my old self were here, he'd say, "Of course they were symptoms. The real problem has always been the people." But he'd say it in that awfully tired "people are the source of the problem because they are evil or stupid or both" way. </p>
<p>I now exist in a context where most things can be explained without the use of adjectives like evil and stupid. And with some creativity and knowledge of human behavior, I believe most crises can be averted long before they amount to train wrecks. I even <a href="http://www.webvisionsevent.com/new-york/session/the-honey-badger-way--p5f4/?redir=L25ldy15b3JrL3Nlc3Npb25zLyMxMQ==">give talks about this</a>. Simplistic black or white (evil and stupid) explanations are tempting and the forté of, as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637">Daniel Kahneman</a> dubs it, System 1 mode of thinking: the automatic brain. But as Einstein put it, "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler." Even the simplest analysis of human behavior maps to some shade of gray, not black or white, and requires the critical thinking offered by System 2. And, in no small part due to the opportunities I received at Microsoft, I learned to see and paint with grays. In a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167404/">Sixth Sense</a> like twist of fate, I learned the "Why?" of A Website Named Desire. </p>
<p>The best part of it all is that I also came face-to-face with and embraced a reality most people aren't fortunate enough to truly discover in their lifetimes: my mind's version of reality will never equal true reality. And no amount of knowledge or experience will likely ever make it so. </p>
<p>10,000 hours well spent, if you ask me. </p>
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A Silver Lininghttp://rainypixels.com/words/a-silver-lining/2012-11-07T13:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>Today, a little over half of America has a bit of a strut in its walk because of one guy: Nate Silver. </p>
<p>For those of you who weren't watching, Silver is a NYT statistician and author of <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/">Five Thirty Eight</a> who gave Obama around 90% odds for winning a second term. He even bet Joe Scarborough $1000 (a bet that Joe ridiculed but didn't take). <a href="http://gawker.com/5958260/americas-chief-wizard-nate-silver-had-the-best-election-night-of-anybody-and-heres-why-a-guide">Gawker has a good summary</a>.</p>
<figure class="center l">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/silver.jpeg" alt="Side-by-side electoral maps" title="Side-by-side electoral maps" />
<figcaption>Left: Silver's prediction; Right: Actual turnout. photo credit: <a href="https://twitter.com/cosentino/status/266042007758200832/">@cosentino</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<div class="centerm"><!--more--></div>
<p>Now we know that not only was Silver right, but his model nailed the results in all 50 states rendering him <a href="http://isnatesilverawitch.com/">an overnight sensation</a>. Silver is (half of) America's knight in silver (OK, I apologize) armor leading the charge against those evil political pundits who use nothing more than their awfully fallible gut feelings to make predictions. The verdict is in and the pitchforks are out. "Down with gut feelings! Long live logic! Long live the maths!"</p>
<p>There's only one problem with this new mantra: it's plain wrong. </p>
<p>I suspect a majority, say 90%, of the folks chanting this mantra haven't the slightest clue about how Silver's model works. Fortunately, there's a human-readable explanation of his methodology <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/">here</a> (note: this one is for Senate forecasts which inherits much of its methodology from that for Presidential forecasts) as well as <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/models-models-everywhere/">an informative piece on predictive models</a> by Silver himself. </p>
<p>You don't have to go too far into either of these pieces to quickly realize that his model relies heavily on voter polls. In other words, Silver's model performs a statistical analysis on voters' presidential candidate preferences which — at least each side believes this about the other — are almost always based on gut feelings. </p>
<p>In my view, Silver's model isn't anti-gut. Quite to the contrary, it's very pro-gut. And if you've taken my repeated advice to read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gut-Feelings-The-Intelligence-Unconscious/dp/0670038636">Gigerenzer's writings</a>, you know that this is well worth celebrating.</p>
Why Instagram Workshttp://rainypixels.com/words/why-instagram-works/2012-10-18T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>At a conscious level, we participate in social networks for all sorts of reasons: to connect with friends, to keep family abreast of personal news, to share our pictures, to play social games, to send and receive event invites, and so on. At a subconscious level, however, social networking is about one thing above all others: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory">signaling</a>.</p>
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<p>Signaling is something we associate with animals. The quintessential example of signaling is that of the peacock that spreads its tail feathers to score a mate. The phenomenon serves as an evolutionary communication channel for the purposes of reproduction. Traditionally evolutionary biologists have believed that the peacock tail signal is a <em>costly</em> one: among other things, by maintaining a large, beautiful tail of feathers, the peacock proves to potential mates that he can survive in the wild in spite of this inconvenient appendage. There <a href="http://www.science20.com/gerhard_adam/peacock_problem-79331">remains some controversy around the cost</a> of this particular signal, but I digress.</p>
<p>The most interesting and arguably, powerful, type of signal is the dishonest signal. Take green frogs, for instance, that signal territorial defense by croaking in a certain way. As <a href="http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/2/169.full">a study has found</a>, green frogs often lower the acoustic frequency of their calls to exaggerate their own size. This bluff, of course, is designed to intimidate potential predators and competitors.</p>
<p>A successful dishonest signal involves a certain level of anonymity on the part of the sender. It's imperative for the green frog's true size to be concealed for his dishonest signal to work as intended. The ability of the green frog to mimic an authentic sounding lower frequency call is key as well. Finally, the dishonesty must leverage the state of the specific environment.</p>
<p>In the case of humans, it's worth clarifying the concept of a dishonest signal. It's tempting to associate dishonesty with lying, but that's generally far from the case. The dishonesty we're talking about here is in relation to the perceived image of the individual. A white lie can often be a classic example of a dishonest human signal. Your friend gets a haircut. You think it looks awful. But you compliment her because there are more social benefits associated with the delivering a compliment in that situation. Dishonest signaling is thus an extremely important part of being a social being and serves a very important purpose among human beings.</p>
<p>Since they serve as one of the primary signaling channels of our day, it's key for social networks to facilitate dishonest signaling between humans.</p>
<p>From this perspective, Facebook is at a severe disadvantage. Facebook requires that you craft an intricate online persona of yourself complete with demographic information, pictures, relationship status, political and religious affiliations, educational qualifications, and so on. Not only that, but Facebook broadcasts literally everything you do to everyone. And you are expected to snap to this image you've created. When you stray from it — that is, when you broadcast a perceived dishonest signal or one that is alien to your persona — the bluff is generally called in the form of dissenting comments and behaviors. In the long run, it means <em>less</em>, or worse, as we saw with MySpace, <em>less meaningful</em> engagement.</p>
<p>Twitter is better. You can remain relatively anonymous on Twitter, even completely anonymous (but it generally comes at the cost of certain popularity goals). The high fidelity of the signal, <em>i.e.</em> written language, often requires cleverness on the part of broadcasters but for the most part, Twitter is an effective networking channel in that it facilitates a healthy amount of dishonest signaling. Apart from the enforced character limit, it comes pretty close to signaling in real life.</p>
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<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/Photo-Oct-13-4-20-38-PM.png" alt="Instagram's News Feed" title="Instagram's News Feed" />
<figcaption>Instagram's selective news feed.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Instagram is almost a perfect channel. You can remain as anonymous as you please and unless you've set your account to private, you can be followed by (and follow) anyone. The signals broadcasted on Instagram are images which, as the saying goes, speak a thousand words. In other words, the signals are left up to the interpretation of the receivers. And, the channel itself does very little broadcasting of what you do, which means that others' perceptions of you are mostly based on your own signals rather than ones created on your behalf.</p>
<p>Where is all this coming from? Over the past few months I've been trying to explain an emerging pattern in my social networking practices. Certain pictures receive hundreds of likes and lead to over a hundred comments on Instagram, but the very same pictures receive only a handful of likes and scolding comments on Facebook. Often a picture that seems to bring a tremendous amount of joy to my followers on Instagram can (and has) led to an argument on Facebook. The key seems to lie in the ability of each of these networks to facilitate dishonest signaling. While one (Instagram) promotes it, the other (Facebook) seems to encourage behavior that attempts to squash anything that could be a dishonest signal.</p>
<p>The problem: When a channel overly polices dishonest signaling, the channel itself becomes dishonest. I wonder if this is why more and more people seem to be talking about Facebook as a venue for being fake, and consider <em>Facebooking</em> to be not as much fun anymore.</p>
<p>Don't get me wrong, though. <a href="http://rainypixels.com/words/why-im-buying-facebook/">I'm still investing in Facebook</a>.</p>
The Story of the New Microsoft.comhttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-story-of-the-new-microsoft-com/2012-10-02T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>A few weeks ago Microsoft silently launched a new home page. It was meant to be a temporary launch for the purposes of some preliminary testing. But as fate would have it, it became the talk of the Internet. Twitter was abuzz with opinions. <a href="http://www.ghacks.net/2012/06/28/microsoft-launches-metro-inspired-website-preview/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter">Several</a> <a href="http://www.liveside.net/2012/06/28/microsoft-com-website-gets-a-new-design">blogs</a> and <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/28/3122932/microsoft-metro-like-homepage-design">online news sites, including The Verge</a>, wrote about it. And, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Even <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/29/microsoft-home-page">Gruber gave it two thumbs up</a>.</p>
<figure class="center l"><img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/logo.jpeg" alt="Microsoft logo" title="Microsoft logo" width="1000" height="214" /></figure>
<p>This week marked the real launch of the new Microsoft.com home page. And as someone who has been involved on and off with the project from the moment it was conceived, I thought I'd tell you the story, albeit extensively abridged, behind the new Microsoft.com.</p>
<p>Grab a seat.</p>
<div class="centerm"><!--more--></div>
<h1>Serendipity</h1>
<p>"Will you meet with my team and talk to them about modern web design and development?" asked my wife, Pita, as she walked through our front door one evening. "This an important year for Microsoft. Our home page needs to be a leader on the Web on every front."</p>
<p>My wife recently took over as Director of Program Management for the Microsoft.com team. Her team is the middle prong in the trident that produces any web site under the Microsoft.com domain. An engineering team implements the actual solutions that are designed by a group of marketers and designers; among other things, Pita's team oversees the proper execution of the projects. Pita wanted me to meet with the all the teams involved to share some lessons on modern web development: something I generally do exclusively at industry conferences.</p>
<p>"It's not my job!", I protested. She responded, "You're my husband, Nishant." That was that.</p>
<figure class="xl center grid3">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/slide1.001.png" alt="Slide 1" title="Slide 1" width="720" height="540" class="grid4m" />
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/slide2.014.png" alt="Slide 2" title="Slide 2" width="720" height="540" class="grid4m" />
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/slide3.016.png" alt="Slide 3" title="Slide 3" width="720" height="540" class="grid4" />
<figcaption>A few slides from the hour long presentation that started the Microsoft.com conversation. </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So, I prepared and delivered an hour long presentation wherein I outlined the tenets — progressive enhancement, responsiveness, and adaptiveness among others — of modern web sites as best as one could in an hour long presentation. I initially delivered the presentation to a part of the marketing organization run by Raju Malhotra. Incidentally, with Windows 8 and a whole new array of devices on the horizon, Raju's team had been discussing a better cross-device strategy for Microsoft.com. In hindsight, I can't help but smile at the serendipitous timing of all these conversations. Excited by the solution I proposed, he insisted I deliver it to his boss' entire team. So I did.</p>
<p>It's this next presentation where everything started to fall in place. In fact, the presentation itself turned into an animated discussion about whether it was possible, or even sensible, for Microsoft.com to <em>go modern</em>.</p>
<h1>The Psychology of Loss</h1>
<p>For those of you who don't know <a href="http://danariely.com/">Dan Ariely</a>, he's a Behavioral Economist with a penchant for scientifically pinning down the myriad irrational ways of human beings. In his brilliant book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061353248/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1291841327&sr=1-1">Predictably Irrational</a>, Ariely explains a cognitive bias called <em>loss aversion</em>:
</p>
<blockquote><p>Our aversion to loss is a strong emotion, one that sometimes causes us to make bad decisions. Do you wonder why we often refuse to sell some of our cherished clutter, and if somebody offers to buy it, we attach an exorbitant price tag to it?" </p></blockquote>
<p>Indeed, research has shown that our brain feels more pleasure merely by the promise of avoiding losses than when it actually acquires gains.</p>
<p>At the time of this writing, Microsoft.com is <a href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/microsoft.com">ranked as the 30th most visited site</a> in the world ahead of Apple, Pinterest, Tumblr, Adobe, BBC, Flickr, Craigslist, and many others. In the time you've been reading this article, thousands of users visited nearly one hundred localized versions of Microsoft.com on thousands of different devices driven by countless expectations. And as you would expect, the Microsoft.com team has spent over a decade instrumenting and fine tuning the home page in sophisticated ways to meet the complex matrix of needs of these users.</p>
<p>This is hardly unique to Microsoft. Other top 100 sites like Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Amazon all cope with the same challenge. And whether it's <a href="http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html">Google's obsessiveness in testing for the right shade of blue</a>, or <a href="http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_abtesting/">Amazon's heavy reliance on A/B testing</a> — one that I myself utilized when I worked on Instant Video and Kindle — it all serves the same goal: meeting user needs. And as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy">McNamara's Fallacy</a> has proven, data often leads even the most well-intentioned awry.</p>
<figure class="xl center"><img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/amazon_sideways.png" alt="Amazon Kindle Fire Home Page" title="Amazon Kindle Fire Home Page" width="1400" height="100" /><figcaption>The Amazon Kindle Fire page pictured sideways. The page is approximately 21000px in length.</figcaption></figure>
<p>It's easy to browse the Web and mock <a href="http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/">Web pages that suck</a>. And, whether it's the web page of a software giant or a mom-and-pop shop, behind what may seem like obvious design gaffes ultimately lies a nuanced set of decisions fortified by the fear of losing everything: brand loyalty, established user patterns, and ultimately, revenue. Ironically, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," is the adage that's often at the root of the problem. What looks broken to you and me about Facebook's UI or Amazon's seemingly never-ending product pages, are more often than not, "by design".</p>
<p>For the Microsoft.com team to take a calculated risk and pour their understanding of their users into a cleaner, smarter, and modern page, the change had to start with the the source of the, and in my opinion <em>every</em>, problem: People.</p>
<h1>People Keep on Learning</h1>
<p>"There was this moment when Trent was standing up at the front of the room showing us an early concept, and someone asked if we could allow the menu to support four levels of hierarchy. Without pause, we heard Trent yell, 'No! Just… NO!' He had a grin on his face. It was one of those 'No, but I still like you' no's'. I knew in that moment that this was going to go well," said Michael Ruggiero, the development manager for the home page, to me over pizza a couple of weeks ago. Michael entrusted much of the integration and optimization work to a very talented developer on his team, Tyson Matanich, who worked closely with the crew from Paravel to build the site you see today.</p>
<figure class="l center">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/paravel_sites.jpg" alt="Paravel collaborations" title="Paravel collaborations" width="1400" height="892" />
<figcaption>From left to right: Lost World's Fairs, 10K Apart, Build Conference</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In my early discussions with the team, I'd outlined a model that involved bringing in some outside talent and integrating them carefully into the Microsoft team. Building mobile first web sites is a bleeding edge topic, and unless you're living on that edge, it's best to defer to the expertise of someone who is. I recommended <a href="http://trentwalton.com">Trent</a>, <a href="http://daverupert.com/">Dave</a>, and <a href="http://reaganray.com/">Reagan</a>, the Austin boys behind my favorite design shop, <a href="http://paravelinc.com/">Paravel, Inc</a>. Having collaborated with the three amigos on several very successful and visible projects — <a href="http://lostworldsfairs.com">Lost World's Fairs</a>, <a href="http://10k.aneventapart.com">10K Apart</a>, and most recently, the <a href="http://rainypixels.com/words/build-it-fast/">Build conference</a> site — I was certain that they had the right skill set to complement that of the Microsoft team, but more importantly, the right attitudes.</p>
<p>The software industry takes pride in the <a href="http://mashable.com/2011/11/06/how-to-ace-technical-interview/">technical interview</a>. But what started with the noble intention of hiring the best people has turned into an often reductionist game of hiring those who excel on a singular axis: answering mostly ridiculous technical questions and brainteasers in the moment. The most regrettable casualty of these hiring practices is typically <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Intelligence-Matter-More-Than/dp/055338371X">the emotional intelligence</a> of the candidate. Simply put, their personality. This is ironic not only because the ability to write magnificent code or masterfully organize pixels often plays a very tertiary role in the process of innovation, but because it is ultimately balanced people coming together to solve a problem that leads to the kind of emotional experiences that make for hit software products today. My friend and hero, <a href="http://www.billbuxton.com/">Bill Buxton</a>, a decorated Microsoft designer, provides what I consider to be <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2009/id20090713_332802.htm">the best recipe for hiring such people</a>.</p>
<p>Fortunately, Benson Chan, Raju's newly appointed Product Manager for Microsoft.com — in other words, the guy with the butt on the line for the user experience — got this better than most people. Benson and I grabbed lunch after I presented to his team, and he understood well that the key to success for this project was to create and empower a small team of the people who were <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2009/id20090713_332802.htm">I-shaped</a>: the kind of people who were willing to try new things, challenge the status quo, balance theories with reality, learn from and support each other, and were willing to embrace our friends from Austin.</p>
<p>Not to mention, a group that was willing to reach into their gut to design the right experience.</p>
<h1>Designing from the Gut</h1>
<p>The power of intuition was brought into the limelight in 2005 thanks to Malcolm Gladwell's national bestseller, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316010669">Blink</a>. What most people don't know is that Gladwell drew heavily from the research of a German psychologist, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Gigerenzer">Gerd Gigerenzer</a>, who's been publishing research and writing books on the topic since the 90's.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gut-Feelings-The-Intelligence-Unconscious/dp/0670038636">Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious</a>, Gigerenzer introduces us to a notion he dubs <em>evolved capacities</em>: complex capabilities given to us by nature, like sight or memory that we’ve evolved to unconsciously perform complex tasks, like the ability to track a moving object. As it turns out, humans are pretty bad at, say, predicting the trajectory of a ball. So, in order to actually catch a ball, we use certain evolved capacities in tandem with a rule of thumb called the gaze heuristic: fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so that the angle of the gaze remains constant.</p>
<p>If there is one thing Gigerenzer's research confirms without the slightest doubt, it's that our gut is truly intelligent. In fact, it is the primary mode of intelligence required in solving a gamut of problems — driving a car, catching a ball, predicting stock prices, making decisions on the battlefield, and countless others. My contribution to the list: Design.</p>
<p>Designing from the gut is a radical concept. It is generally met with a tremendous amount of friction in most software circles that tend to rely heavily on "logic and data" for all decisions. This is not to say that there isn't a place for telemetry or usability studies in the act of designing software. It's simply a question of when and where.</p>
<p>"In rethinking the user experience, we didn’t want to simply offer up X number of programmable slots. We got together as a team to discuss how to best create an experience to tell our product stories, meet the needs of our customers, and how we wanted to have a beautiful experience across any device. We drew learnings from analytics and previous A/B testing, but at the end of the day it was strategy by gut, tweaking by data." said Benson to me when we met in the RedWest campus of Microsoft a few days ago in reference to the impressive hero graphic that spans the top of the page. It's easy to understate the significance of his statement in the absence of context. But consider that the new hero graphic is a huge departure from the information architecture of the last few versions of the site. The image below speaks a thousand words that amount to: <em>go with your gut</em>.</p>
<figure class="xl center">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/old-new.jpg" alt="Comparison of old and new headers." title="Comparison of old and new headers." width="1400" height="377" />
<figcaption>Left: Old header with multiple slots; Right: New header with one crisp message</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Microsoft.com team had the ability and freedom to make gut calls like this one, and this brings to the foreground the final and most important ingredient of this project that I can fit into the attention span of a Web reader.</p>
<h1>Leaders Are Made, Not Born</h1>
<p>"My favorite part of this project? Leadership. This project, more than any other I've been a part of, had leadership. Not management, but leadership," reflected Greg Bader, the Program Manager on Pita's team responsible for driving the execution and launch of the Microsoft.com home page project. Curiously, when I probed him about whom he considered the leader of this project, he said, "Well, Benson was a rockstar Product Manager. But we couldn't have done any of this without Tyson, who is the best developer I've ever worked with. But, Trent and crew brought such feeling and expertise to the project. I suppose none of this would have ever happened if Pita hadn't pushed for it and provided us air cover in the first place. I guess… everyone on the project was a leader."</p>
<p>This sentiment was echoed in my other informal conversations as well. "It wasn't about us vs. them. We were all in it together. It was very Gestalt," said Michael Ruggiero. "Never once did I feel that my own management was telling me what to do. My entire management chain just trusted us to go make the right calls," said Benson.</p>
<p>The most common cause of failure in most large organizations is micromanagement, not just by appointed leadership, but by everyone involved. And in terms of risk factors, this project exhibited far too many that could have led to a culture of micromanagement: a distributed team, a tight timeline, limited budget, complicated requirements, lofty goals, and not to mention, strangers from Austin taking the lead on design.</p>
<p>In the words of <a href="http://www.druckerinstitute.com/link/about-peter-drucker/">Peter Drucker</a>, the man who is often credited to have invented management, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." I repeatedly found examples of Drucker's wisdom whenever I stopped to peek into the progress of the Microsoft.com project.</p>
<p>And the payout for this management philosophy was significant.</p>
<h1>The Proof is in the Pudding</h1>
<p>The new Microsoft.com home page is designed with a multi-device future in mind. And if you didn't already catch this, the page is, as <a href="http://ethanmarcotte.com/">Ethan Marcotte</a> coined the term, <a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/">Responsive</a>. The Responsive movement rose from the proliferation of smartphones and tablets initially driven by Apple; ironically, even Apple.com is not responsive yet.</p>
<p>It's easy to dismiss this project by saying, "It's just a page. Big deal." That would miss the point entirely. It would also be entirely inaccurate. The Microsoft.com team built tools, guidelines, and processes to help localize everything from responsive images to responsive content into approximately 100 different markets. They built instrumentation to track the behaviors of their users on multiple axes. They built a device lab to test the page on a multitude of devices. They adapted their CMS to allow Content Strategists to program content on the site.</p>
<p>As the <a href="http://paravelinc.com/work/microsoft.php">Microsoft.com case study on Paravel's site</a> illustrates, the team built a bleeding edge site in the real world.</p>
<p>This project is innovation in its best form: the kind that has the courage to take bold yet calculated risks. And it represents the start of a movement, the type that has the power to ripple not only through a large organization, but the world. Shortly after the site previewed a couple of months ago, Luke Wroblewski, one of the leading experts on mobile first development and the author of <a href="http://www.abookapart.com/products/mobile-first">an excellent book by the same title</a>, tweeted —</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"><p>Now when someone asks: "But are any big companies using responsive Web design?' You can answer: "Yes. Microsoft."</p>— Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) <a href="https://twitter.com/lukew/status/218743869058199556" data-datetime="2012-06-29T16:32:57+00:00">June 29, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<h1>The Moral of the Story</h1>
<p>We tend to attribute singular causes to successful software projects: the developer was awesome, the designer was a rockstar, Basecamp made our project successful, management gave us all the freedom in the world, Steve Jobs, and the list goes on. We like our stories to have neat conclusions. It's just human.</p>
<p>But reality is much more nuanced and complex as the Microsoft.com story illustrates. Even as I wrote this post, I wondered to myself, "Was there one thing above others that made this project successful?" Was it that each member of this project team was humble? Or that there were clear accountabilities and roles across the board? Or that the timeline was just tight enough to force decisions? Or that the team members themselves had a certain level of experience in the industry? Maybe it was the undying trust that the leaders of the various teams placed in their employees?</p>
<p>The more I thought about it, the more reasons I came up with, and the tougher it became to weigh one higher than the other.</p>
<p>So, in the end, I can't give you one reason this project succeeded. I am compelled, however, to list all twenty-five — </p>
<p><em>Abe Thomas, <a href="http://twitter.com/benson_chan">Benson Chan</a>, Bidur Adhikari, Chris Johnson, Claire Jennings, Dan Ma, Duane Clare, Greg Bader, Jeff Case, Joe Chung, Joseph Ho, <a href="http://twitter.com/thatpita">Kalpita Kothary</a>, Kavitha Mullapudi, Kimberly Wolk, Liliana Aguila, Michael Ruggiero, Mike Brewer, Mike Wu, <a href="http://twitter.com/RajuMalhotra">Raju Malhotra</a>, Rick Holzli, Sha Zhou, Steve McGinnis, Steve Whitford, Steve Yin, Tyson Matanich.</em></p>
<div class="ui l">Be sure to check out Trent Walton's companion blog post on <a href="http://trentwalton.com/2012/10/03/a-new-microsoft-com/">designing the new Microsoft.com</a>.</div>
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Twitter is Just Another Churchhttp://rainypixels.com/words/twitter-is-just-another-church/2012-08-18T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>My wife and I recently visited <a href="http://www.sagradafamilia.cat/">Sagrada Família</a> in Barcelona. It is a humongous and intricately planned Catholic church designed by the renowned architect, Antoni Gaudí. Apart from the fantastic details, symbolism, and architectural innovations it boasts, what really makes Sagrada Família stand out from the hundreds of other Catholic churches around the world is that it is still under construction. And this is by design.</p>
<figure class="center l"><img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/sagrada.jpg" alt="Sagrada Família" title="Sagrada Família" width="800" height="600" /><figcaption>Sagrada Família by Antoni Gaudí. Image credit: Wikipedia.</figure>
<div class="centerm"><!--more--></div>
<p>Indeed, construction on this church commenced in 1882, and Gaudí planned for its construction to continue well after his death in 1926. At this time, the estimated completion date is 2026, Gaudí's death centennial.</p>
<p>Why on earth would a designer plan for one of his projects to be completed after his death especially if he knew that it was to be the most significant work of his career, and possibly of any architect's career? Seems like an insane move.</p>
<p>But you know what they say about the line between insanity and genius. And Gaudí was no basket case.</p>
<p>Gaudí, a devout Catholic, envisioned the most intimate of prayer destinations for his fellow Catholics. And he figured the best way to capture this intimacy was to execute one of the bravest maneuvers in design: allow others to complete his design. Indeed, his blueprints left guidelines for architects from future generations on how to complete different parts of the church.</p>
<p>Contrary to popular belief, the genius of Gaudí wasn't his nature-inspired architecture. It was his vision of laying a framework that allowed for future generations to play a key role in the outcome of the Sagrada Família. And the result is a breathtaking structure that is as much the peoples as it is Gaudí's. Magnificent, intimate, and in a class of its own, even if controversial.</p>
<p>Twitter, in so many ways, is the Sagrada Família of the tech world. The best of Twitter — mentions, retweets, hashtags, to name a few – <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/twitter-6th-anniversary-mentions-hashtags-retweets/story?id=16779126#.UC5uVGOe5Xc">came from its users or third-party applications</a>. And Twitter's unique genius was that they embraced these innovations, in turn making Twitter something bigger than what it ever set out to be. But <a href="https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api">that era seems to have just ended</a>.</p>
<p>Folks like <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/08/16/twitter-drop-dead">Gruber</a>, <a href="http://www.marco.org/2012/08/16/twitter-api-changes">Arment</a>, and <a href="http://brooksreview.net/2012/08/twitter-bullshit/">Brooks</a> have summed up pretty much all there is to be said. There's one point I read somewhere that I disagree with, though: that 99% of twitter users won't be able to tell the difference. Sure, they won't be able to tell the difference <em>today</em>. But what about tomorrow?</p>
<p>Twitter's move is akin to ending construction too prematurely on Sagrada Família. If that had happened, the Sagrada Família would have become just another church. And, I suppose that's not a bad thing.</p>
<p>But it's certainly not what it could have been.</p>
Build It Fasthttp://rainypixels.com/words/build-it-fast/2012-08-10T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>One of psychology's well-established principles is known as the speed-accuracy trade-off: the faster a task is performed, the less accurate it becomes. Intuitively, this makes sense. We think that haste makes waste and we regularly tell others to take their time.</p>
<figure class="center l"><img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/skyline.png" alt="Seattle skyline by Reagan Ray" title="Seattle skyline by Reagan Ray" width="800" height="205" /><figcaption>Seattle skyline illustration by <a href="http://reaganray.com/">Reagan Ray</a>.</figure>
<div class="centerm"><!--more--></div>
<p>As Gerd Gigerenzer writes in his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gut-Feelings-The-Intelligence-Unconscious/dp/0670038636">Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious</a>, the speed-accuracy trade-off applies only to novices. All bets are off if you're experienced. In fact, focusing consciously and "taking your time" will actually hurt your performance if you're someone with much experience in the field at hand.</p>
<blockquote><p> How can we account for this apparent paradox? Expert skills are executed by unconscious parts of our brains, and conscious thinking about the sequence of behaviors interferes and becomes detrimental to performance. Setting a time limit is one method to make thinking difficult; providing a distracting task is another.</p></blockquote>
<h1>24</h1>
<p>I recently invited the intensely talented <a href="http://paravelinc.com">Paravel trio</a> to help me design a site to help sell out Microsoft's Build conference. Our timeframe was roughly 10 days to deliver the markup. I pitched the project to Trent and team on July 23rd, 2012. We kicked the project off the next day, the 24th, with an end date of August 2nd to hand the markup off to our back-end developers.</p>
<p>This meant that to stay on schedule, we'd have 24 hours to sign off on the basic design: a wireframe and close-to-final copy for the site. Yes, that's 24 <strong>hours</strong>.</p>
<p>As the only member of the design team who was also a Microsoft employee with the most knowledge about Build, we decided that I would take the first stab. Reagan and Trent stood by ready to rebound the design as soon as it landed on their side of the net.</p>
<p>I'll spare you the details because the image below speaks a thousand words. On the left was what I delivered to the Paravel crew (around 6pm on the 24th). On the right is the result of Reagan & Trent applying their magic, all within 24 hours. Now, compare it with <a href="http://buildwindows.com/launch">the site we launched</a> on August 8th.</p>
<figure class="center l">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/build12_combined.png" alt="Build in 24 hours" title="Build in 24 hours" />
<figcaption>left: The initial wireframe I delivered at the 6h mark; right: The color comp delivered in 24h after a couple of volleys with Paravel</figcaption>
</figure>
<h1>Love at first site</h1>
<p>On the Build project, most of our decisions were guided by spontaneous gut feelings because that's all our schedule allowed. But as luck (and some good ol' psychology) would have it, that didn't seem to prove detrimental to the quality of the site. In fact, quite to the contrary, it seemed to drastically improve its overall quality, and <a href="http://trentwalton.com/2012/08/10/buildwindows-com/">as Trent writes</a> in his post, even the decisions we made along the way. Food for thought? I think so.</p>
<p>Not to mention, the event sold out in <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3228095/microsoft-build-2012-registration-sold-out">a record 53 minutes</a>.</p>
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Lying About Lyinghttp://rainypixels.com/words/lying-about-lying/2012-06-20T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>My mum divorced my father in the mid-eighties in India. If you know anything about India, then you know what a radical move this was on her part — divorcees were treated like dirt back then in India.</p>
<p>As you would expect, a few of her siblings were very upset about the divorce but not for reasons you may imagine. Back then, the family of a divorcee typically became the talk of the town. Their character, culture, and integrity were brought into question, and their social graph changed for the worse. What made matters worse in my mum's case is that she was divorcing a man from a particularly affluent family.</p>
<p>Her siblings were upset that she would do this to them. That she would subject the family to such an ordeal.</p>
<p>If memory serves me well — and knowing what we know about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashbulb_memory">flashbulb memories</a>, I have a nagging suspicion that it doesn't — this was the first real paradox I had to cope with in my life. I was about 7 years old, and I remember tormenting over why my mother's family, who is supposed to love her unconditionally, would not support her decision. I was angry, and that anger fueled a better part of my adolescence.</p>
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<p>Anger is interesting because it is always accompanied by self-deception. We direct anger at people because they are doing something wrong; implicitly, we're acting on an assumption that we'd never have or would commit the same crime. And maybe that's true for a particular situation, e.g. I would never abandon my own sibling for social or monetary gains, but even that's unknowable.</p>
<p>Regardless, what's certain is that even as we direct our anger towards others failings, we do so blind to our own vast collection of flaws. Clearly, we must rank our own flaws as lesser evils, for if that weren't the case, we'd be more careful about criticizing others.</p>
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<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/HonestTruthaboutHonesty-hc-c.jpg" alt="The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty by Dan Ariely" title="The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty by Dan Ariely" width="360" height="540" />
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<p>The fact is that we're all liars, but we've always known this deep down, and the topic has consumed many a philosopher's life. But the notion of deception took an interesting turn in the last couple of weeks with the release of Dan Ariely's latest book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Honest-Truth-About-Dishonesty-Everyone-Especially/dp/0062183591">The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves</a>. Ariely not only confirms much of what we've known intuititively (or through related readings), but sheds light on the nuances of deceiving others and ourselves. Not only does he share some of the most fascinating behavioral studies I've ever read, but he also pins down a fundamental truth about deception:</p>
<blockquote><p>In a nutshell, the central thesis is that our behavior is driven by two opposing motivations. On one hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. We want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves (psychologists call this ego motivation). On the other hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money as possible (this is the standard financial motivation). Clearly these two motivations are in conflict. How can we secure the benefits of cheating and at the same time still view ourselves as honest, wonderful people? This is where our amazing cognitive flexibility comes into play.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Read it. Trust me, it's more fun spotting dishonesty, both in others and ourselves, than it is to pretend like it's something else, or worse, that it doesn't exist in places it most certainly does.</p>
Why Apple Gets Laidhttp://rainypixels.com/words/why-apple-gets-laid/2012-06-12T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>Here's some free advice for you single folk.</p>
<p>The next time you go to a bar with the intention of getting laid, bring a friend with you. Not just any friend, however, but one who sort of looks like a tad uglier version of you: crooked teeth, nose longer than yours, overweight compared to you, slightly disproportionate features. You get the idea.</p>
<p>Why? It'll drastically improve your chances of getting laid.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Hidden-Forces-Decisions/dp/006135323X">Ariely writes</a>, humans are magnificently poor at judging the intrinsic value of something. We derive the value of an object X by comparing it to a similar object Y. This is why your chances of getting laid improve when you bring along a slightly uglier friend — the "decoy" — to a night out.</p>
<p>Apple knows <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Game-Penetrating-Society-Artists/dp/0060554738">the game</a> all too well.</p>
On Likeshttp://rainypixels.com/words/on-likes/2012-06-08T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>Over the past few months, I've found that there are 3 main reasons people like (or, more broadly, "star") anything on social networks:</p>
<ol>
<li>To broadcast their stance.</li>
<li>To deal with guilt.</li>
<li>To suck up.</li>
</ol>
<p>This is not to say there aren't other reasons but just that these are the most common ones. Unsurprisingly, liking something usually (for most people) has nothing to do with actually liking it in the physiological sense of the word. Of course, you'll hear a different story if you were to ask most people why they liked something. And, to be fair, they're not lying (not consciously, anyway). That's the beauty of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation">confabulations</a>.</p>
<p>Likes are one of the most physical manifestations of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory">signalling</a> of our time, and they come with the added benefits of being fast and cheap (not always, though, but let's save that for a deeper dive). But what really interests us about likes, whether we admit it or not, is that, true to their signalling roots, they are monetizable, both, for cash and in kind.</p>
<p>What's not to like.</p>
The Devil is in the Detailshttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-devil-is-in-the-details/2012-05-24T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>In case you haven't seen this already, here's a priceless gem (via <a href="http://twitter.com/reybango">@reybango</a>).</p>
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<p>Once your reptilian response has passed, and your blood pressure is back to normal, you have to admit that one particular detail of his proposed solution is quite curious: Put the "lesbians" in one compound, and the "gays and queers" in the other. This seemed really inefficient to me at first particularly because he'd prefaced his solution with an assertion that he'd really spent some time thinking this one through. But then it dawned upon me that he was trying to mitigate the situation of homosexuals succumbing to heterosexuality purely out of the necessity for procreation.</p>
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<p>But, this in turn, brings up many interesting questions. Here are just two:</p>
<ol>
<li>If you were really trying to punish the "lesbians, gays, and queers", wouldn't you want them to give up their identity in the worst way possible, i.e. be forced into heterosexuality?</li>
<li>If the concentration camp members were to start reproducing, doesn't that, in some sense, constitute a "cure"? Or at least the beginnings of a "cure"? Wouldn't you want to be the guy who "cured" them?</li>
</ol>
<p>Needless to say, I'm being rhetorical here. If the pastor were able to answer those questions, or simply come up with those questions without assistance, he'd have delivered a very different sermon. This is not to say that he'd have a different view on the topic, but that he'd have a different strategy for achieving his goal, as severely misguided as it were, of eradicating "lesbians, gays, and queers". Instead, the strategy he employed immortalizes him in a two-minute video clip that places his bigoted ass squarely in a legendary group of <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=modern+jackass">modern jackasses</a>, unites people to protest his cause and its bigotry, and arouses suspicions about his own repressed homosexuality.</p>
<p>The devil, truly is, in the details.</p>
Why I'm Buying Facebookhttp://rainypixels.com/words/why-im-buying-facebook/2012-05-23T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>Seems like the hottest topic of discussion wherever I go is, "Are you buying Facebook?" The most popular answer I've heard yet is, "I'm not buying. It's a bubble. Let me give you the numbers. There's no way Facebook can make money in the long-run." Ah, if only that's how people invested — based on company balance sheets. I'd be rolling in the dough with all my Microsoft stock. Seriously. Go look at Microsoft's quarterly earnings for the last few quarters. Additionally, the argument assumes that Facebook will have only one product in the future — that Facebook site where you spend 20 minutes a day signalling. But try to read between the lines of <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-the-hacker-way-286499">Zuckerberg's open letter</a> to shareholders, and you should be able to come up with at least three services Facebook could launch that'd completely transform the existing market in those areas, and generate a pretty penny in the process for shareholders.</p>
<p>But, that's not why I am buying Facebook. </p>
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<p>Here's really why (edited version of an email I sent to a few coworkers earlier today) —</p>
<p>My in-laws are habitual traders. They deal in calls and puts, and somehow make us $15-20K every year without selling a single share. I’ve been watching them pretty intently, and the most interesting (frightening, even, but given what we know about <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Hidden-Forces-Decisions/dp/006135323X">irrationality</a>, completely expected) thing about their predictions and trading practices is that they often have NOTHING to do with the actual company financials or factual potential. Literally, there are times where their advice seems to defy any mathematics or logic (to me, anyway), but they’ve rarely been wrong. They judge the markets based on the network shows (CNBC/FOX/etc. — they watch every show, every day, from 6am to noon), magazines/publications that are accessible to the common man, and a bunch of predictive charts (candles, etc.) Really, what it sums up to is that their trading practices heavily take into account top drivers of market perceptions rather just company financials (in other words, they’re pretty tuned into the sentiment of the average trader out there).</p>
<p>All of this is hardly a surprise, though. There are so many studies out there that show that an average person's chances of predicting the stock market are usually higher than those of investment bankers (people tend to pick on really simple heuristics like, “Have I heard of this company before?” or “When I hear the name of the company, do I get a good feeling or a bad one?”) See some of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gut-Feelings-The-Intelligence-Unconscious/dp/0670038636">fascinating studies conducted by Gerd Gigerenzer</a>.</p>
<p>So, I’m on the buy train, unless my in-laws really push back. I really have no expectations of seeing Facebook rise to $500/share or something like that (I promise not to complain if it does, though). I’m buying, and then forgetting about the shares. And given that Facebook has a market cap bigger than Donald Trump's ego, that it's led by a young CEO who's hungry as hell to make a dent in the culture, and that the overall market perception of Facebook is very positive, I'm betting that it's going to be some time before Facebook fades away.</p>
On Creativityhttp://rainypixels.com/words/on-creativity/2012-05-22T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>John Cleese, on creativity (via <a href="http://twitter.com/house">Allison House</a>) —</p>
<blockquote><p>Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating.</p></blockquote>
<p>Here's the full video. It's worth every second of its approximately 30m run time —</p>
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<p>And if you have more than 30 minutes to spare, and have a deeper interest in the question, "What is Creativity?", I highly recommend Csikszentmihalyi's book on the topic, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-Invention/dp/0060928204/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337631179&sr=8-1" title="Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention">Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention</a>. It's the most compelling explanation of the topic I've found yet.
How Wrong Am I Right Now?http://rainypixels.com/words/how-wrong-am-i-right-now/2012-05-20T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>I've been giving more talks lately than I usually allow myself to, and they all deal with some aspect of human psychology and building things. I examine how we, just by being us, with all our peculiarities, can affect what we set out to build, and what ultimately gets built. I've found that typically there is an undesirably large delta between those two.</p>
<p>An antidote I suggest to the problem of being sabotaged by ourselves is introspection: looking within oneself as one goes about living. But that's easier said than done. Introspection is one of those things that you just can't pick up from a book (though, there are <a href="http://rainypixels.com/thereadinglist/" target="_blank">some fantastic and approachable books</a> out there to give you a head start).</p>
<p>But, what's worrisome in its own paradoxically recursive way is that one needs the ability to be introspective about their own introspections to estimate just how accurately they've been introspecting. And, this seems to tend to infinity.</p>
<p>I just re-read what <a href="http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/are-we-infantile-introspectors/" target="_blank">Katja</a> (<a href="http://netcrucible.com/" target="_blank">Josh</a> introduced me to her blog) wrote a while back, and it made me think about this again today. I fear she's completely right.</p>
<blockquote><p>Hypothesis: We have relatively few concepts for the world inside our heads, because it’s not very shared, and we get concepts mostly from other people. This means it is hard to think about the world inside our heads, and so also hard to remember.</p></blockquote>
Back to the Future of Wireframeshttp://rainypixels.com/words/back-to-the-future-of-wireframes/2011-08-04T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<!--raw-->
<p>A year ago, I proposed <a href="http://visitmix.com/Articles/The-Future-of-Wireframes">the future of wireframes</a>.</p>
<p>My proposal centered around relaxing the stranglehold wireframes have on layout decisions. Traditionally, the exact positioning of the different "boxes" of information has been in the information architect's domain. In other words, when a wireframe shows a featured article rotator above a sidebar of resource links, it is <em>expected</em> that the final site will have the featured article rotator above the sidebar of resource links. In fact, it is expected that all such boxes of information show up relative to each other as depicted in the wireframe.</p>
<p>There are several problems with this approach, but let's focus on the fundamental ones.</p>
<h1>I Got 99 Problems</h1>
<p>Despite how things turned out, nature intended the layout and the visual design of a site to go hand-in-hand. You pay a notable price when you <em>decouple</em> these two aspects of the design process: a price that generally manifests in the form of a design that's not very exciting.</p>
<p>In addition to the decoupling problem, there is the problem of lost <em>opportunity cost</em>. When members of a design team have cross-disciplinary skills—that is, when they are experienced <a href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/07/26/defending-the-generalists-in-the-web-design-industry/">generalists</a>—you endure the opportunity cost of not maximizing the team potential if you decouple IA from the rest of the design process.</p>
<p>But finally, there's the question of responsive design: how does IA adapt to include responsive design?</p>
<p>I suspect that those who specialize in IA will argue for more wireframes: wireframes for every form factor. It may be a great way to inflate the project budget, but remember Biggie's infinite wisdom?</p>
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<p>In all seriousness, creating wireframes for the full responsive matrix isn't sustainable. It's counterproductive, and as <a href="http://trentwalton.com/2011/07/14/content-choreography/">Trent points out</a>, it's unnecessary. It also compounds the decoupling and opportunity cost problems I mentioned earlier.
</p>
<p>So, where does that leave us?</p>
<p>It turns out that the key to solving our dilemmas lies in our ability to address the source of all these issues: the issue of <em>control</em>.</p>
<h1>Control Freak</h1>
<p>For the most part, today's approach to IA is similar to architecture in the physical world: create an exact blueprint for what is to be built, and then build it.</p>
<p>This approach worked well when IA was emerging as a discipline in a time where designing for the Web was unchartered territory. It was a practical way to solve problems up front, control scope, and manage stakeholders. But times have changed, and while it's still necessary to know what you want to build up front, it isn't necessary to have it fully locked down. It isn't necessary for the IA to exert full control over it.</p>
<p>In fact, it's better to ease up on the control.</p>
<h1>Fluid Information Architecture</h1>
<p>As I proposed in <a href="http://visitmix.com/Articles/The-Future-of-Wireframes">The Future of Wireframes</a>, information architects (or, whoever owns the wireframes for the project) can often improve the quality of a design drastically by relaxing their control on layout decisions. I introduced the concept of functional wireframes to illustrate this.</p>
<p>My proposal this year—something I'm calling "fluid information architecture" in the spirit of our times—is for wireframes to have less control over other aspects of information architecture, like responsive architecture for a site and functional copy decisions.</p>
<p>There are two major benefits to this approach. First, it allows responsive <a href="http://trentwalton.com/2011/07/14/content-choreography/">content choreography</a> to happen downstream in a much better way. Secondly, due to the nature of the beast, it introduces a level of <a href="http://visitmix.com/writings/rap-it-in-a-grid">delightful unpredictability</a> for our users. Remember, these are exactly the kinds of results we were hoping to gain.</p>
<p>However, the fluid IA approach brings an elephant into the room with it: if the information architect doesn't control the blueprint of the site, then why have the role?</p>
<p>This is worthwhile question, and I've found that the answer varies from project to project depending on scope and makeup of the design team. Sometimes, the answer is for the information architect to focus on other aspects of the process: identifying page-level information, determining relative priority of information (Allison House provides <a href="http://thinkvitamin.com/design/how-to-arrange-interface-elements-4/">an excellent example</a>), capturing page states, and so on.</p>
<p>But a perfectly reasonable answer is for the role of the IA to be combined with surrounding roles, like creative director, or front-end developer, as we did in the 10K project.</p>
<h1>The 10K Apart Case Study</h1>
<p>For those of you who haven't heard of the contest, the 10K challenges contestants to build the best application they can with no more than 10K (yes, kilobytes) of code. You can read about this year's contest <a href="http://visitmix.com/writings/10k-apart-the-responsive-edition">here</a>.</p>
<p>Among other things, I served as the information architect for <a href="http://10k.aneventapart.com/">10K Apart</a>. As you'll see, I drastically reduced the scope and influence of the IA role precisely due to the scope of the project, and who was on the design team.</p>
<p>I was fortunate enough to have the <a href="http://paravelinc.com/">Paravel</a> trio come on board to help design the site. This isn't a gratuitous plug. Paravel is on the top of their game in several areas of the design process—among other things, they create wonderfully laid out websites, and have cracked the responsive nut better than most. This helped me adapt the information architecture approach for the project, particularly in three areas:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Layout</strong> (zero control): I knew I could relax the control I exerted on layout in the wireframes. This is one of Paravel's major strengths, so I put layout in their able hands.</li>
<li><strong>Copy</strong> (relaxed control): Copy, much like layout, can function as a focal point for the site aesthetic. I encouraged the Paravel team to experiment with copy in the context of the visual design.</li>
<li><strong>Responsiveness</strong> (zero control): Paravel is pioneering responsive web experiences. It felt natural to leave the responsive architecture of the site up to them.</li>
</ol>
<p>To fully illustrate my point, I'm making the functional wireframe deck for the project available for your perusal.</p>
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<p><img title="Wireframe thumbnail" src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/wireframes.png" alt="Wireframe thumbnail" width="380" height="233" /></p>
<a class="button button-default" href="http://rainypixels.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/rainypixels/downloads/10K_Responsive_IA.pdf">Download 10K Apart Wireframes →</a> <span class="button-note">1.4MB .PDF</span>
</div>
<p>As you can see, I mandated only one thing: page-level information. The rest was at Paravel's discretion.</p>
<p>Some things they chose to keep (like the entry form and the gallery layouts), while others they completely changed (the hero banner and layout of home page elements). The process was seamlessly fluid as becomes apparent in <a href="http://blog.reaganray.com/">Reagan</a>, <a href="http://trentwalton.com/2011/08/03/10k-apart-the-responsive-edition">Trent</a>, and <a href="http://daverupert.com/2011/08/tiny-apps-on-tiny-devices/">Dave</a>'s posts.</p>
<p>The resulting design—and I may be biased here—turned out to be functional and unpredictably delightful: <a href="http://10k.aneventapart.com/">http://10k.aneventapart.com</a>.</p>
<h1>Finally</h1>
<p>It's widely accepted that the information architecture phase of a project can make or break the final experience. And this is true. But this belief rests on the assumption that control creates predictability. While this checks out in theory, we've seen how it quickly falls apart in practice.</p>
<p>Ironically, in practice it seems that creating predictably delightful designs isn't about exerting control. It's about judiciously giving it up. It's about identifying the right fluidity for the process and establishing the optimal <a href="http://rainypixels.com/writings/journal/life-after-twitter/">flow</a>.</p>
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That's How Our Love Must Be, IE6http://rainypixels.com/words/thats-how-our-love-must-be-ie6/2011-06-23T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>I wrote another break-up letter. This one is to IE6.</p>
<blockquote><p>I've been thinking about this for some time. Losing sleep, waking up screaming with night terrors, imagining us as if it were just yesterday. I think it's time we talk, IE6.</p></blockquote>
<p class="centerm grid7 center"><a href="http://visitmix.com/writings/thats-how-our-love-must-be-ie6"> Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>
Rap it in a Gridhttp://rainypixels.com/words/rap-it-in-a-grid/2011-05-31T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>If you're a musician, then you've already heard this: Learn the theory, practice it, and then forget it. It's only over time that you truly realize the value of this, particularly if you're someone who likes to improvise (in other words, create music on the fly).</p>
<p>As it turns out, music and software design aren't that different. I wrote a few thoughts that came to me while I was reading about Jay-Z.</p>
<blockquote><p>The last thing I expected to find in Jay-Z's excellent new book, <i>Decoded</i>, was a profound insight into a topic that's very near and dear to web designers: grid systems.</p></blockquote>
<p class="centerm grid7 center"><a href="http://visitmix.com/writings/rap-it-in-a-grid"> Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>
RainyShots: A Dribbble Pluginhttp://rainypixels.com/words/rainyshots-a-dribbble-plugin/2011-05-12T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<!--raw-->
<p>When you search for the term, "Dribbble plugin", all paths seemed to lead to <a href="http://daverupert.com/">Dave Rupert</a>'s, aka <a href="http://daverupert.com/">davatron5000</a>'s, <a href="http://daverupert.com/2010/05/dribbble-wordpress-plugin/">WP-Dribbble</a>. WP-Dribbble is a WordPress plugin that adds a latest shots widget mimicking the Dribbble UI to your WordPress blog. Much like the rest of the <a href="http://paravelinc.com">Paravel</a> trio's impressive portfolio, WP-Dribbble is lean, to the point, and "just works".</p>
<p>I'm releasing a plugin today that solves the same problem as WP-Dribbble, but comes at it from a different philosophical angle (and differs in implementation as well). While WP-Dribble can be stripped down to work in "naked" mode, Dave designed it to be plug-and-play — install the plugin, drag the widget into your template, modify a few settings, and bam.</p>
<p><a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rainyshots/">RainyShots</a>, on the other hand, starts off naked.</p>
<h1>Quick Overview</h1>
<p>RainyShots adds a <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags">template tag</a> called <code>rs_shots()</code> to WordPress. When invoked, the function returns the latest 15 shots for a player from <a href="http://dribbble.com/api#get_player_shots">the Dribbble API</a>. Specifically, it returns a <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php">PHP variable representation</a> of the JSON result.</p>
<p>Here's an example of what this lets you do in your own Wordpress templates:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight php"><code><table class="rouge-table"><tbody><tr><td class="rouge-gutter gl"><pre class="lineno">1
2
3
4
5
6
</pre></td><td class="rouge-code"><pre><span class="nv">$shots</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="nx">rs_shots</span><span class="p">();</span>
<span class="k">foreach</span> <span class="p">(</span><span class="nv">$shots</span> <span class="k">as</span> <span class="nv">$shot</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="p">{</span>
<span class="k">echo</span> <span class="s2">"<img src='"</span> <span class="o">.</span> <span class="nv">$shot</span><span class="o">-></span><span class="p">{</span><span class="s2">"image_teaser_url"</span><span class="p">}</span> <span class="o">.</span> <span class="s2">"' alt='"</span> <span class="o">.</span> <span class="nv">$shot</span><span class="o">-></span><span class="p">{</span><span class="s2">"title"</span><span class="p">}</span> <span class="o">.</span> <span class="s2">"' />"</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="p">}</span>
</pre></td></tr></tbody></table></code></pre></div>
<p>The astute among you noticed that we don't pass the player in the function call. Indeed, the player is specified in a very simple admin interface that the plugin adds to the Wordpress Settings section.</p>
<figure class="center">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/admin.gif" width="700px" alt="RainyShots Admin Interface" class="solid-1-light" />
</figure>
<p>The admin also allows you to override the default cache duration — the plugin uses <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Transients_API">Wordpress's Transients API</a> to cache the JSON results for a day by default — and even flush the cache (this is useful, for example, when you post a new shot and you want it to appear immediately on your own site before the natural cache expiration).</p>
<p>So, in a nutshell, the features —</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>New template tag. </strong>The plugin adds the template tag <code>rs_shots()</code> to WordPress.</li>
<li><strong>Caching. </strong>Latest shots are cached for a day, by default. The duration may be overridden, and the cache may be manually reset.</li>
<li><strong>Admin Interface. </strong>A simple admin interface allows you to manage the plugin settings such as player id, cache duration, etc.</li>
</ul>
<p>To give you an idea of a real-world implementation, here's how I generate the shots for the <a href="http://rainypixels.com/#dribbble">Rainypixels home page</a>:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight php"><code><table class="rouge-table"><tbody><tr><td class="rouge-gutter gl"><pre class="lineno">1
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9
10
11
12
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15
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17
</pre></td><td class="rouge-code"><pre><span class="cp"><?php</span>
<span class="nv">$shots</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="nx">rs_shots</span><span class="p">();</span>
<span class="nv">$max</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="mi">6</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="k">for</span> <span class="p">(</span><span class="nv">$x</span><span class="o">=</span><span class="mi">0</span><span class="p">;</span> <span class="nv">$x</span><span class="o"><</span><span class="nv">$max</span><span class="p">;</span> <span class="nv">$x</span><span class="o">++</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="p">{</span>
<span class="nv">$shot</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="nv">$shots</span><span class="p">[</span><span class="nv">$x</span><span class="p">];</span>
<span class="cp">?></span>
<span class="nt"><a</span> <span class="na">href=</span><span class="s">"</span><span class="cp"><?php</span> <span class="k">echo</span> <span class="nv">$shot</span><span class="o">-></span><span class="p">{</span><span class="s2">"url"</span><span class="p">};</span> <span class="cp">?></span><span class="s">"</span><span class="nt">></span>
<span class="nt"><figure</span> <span class="na">class=</span><span class="s">"dribbble-shot"</span><span class="nt">></span>
<span class="nt"><img</span> <span class="na">src=</span><span class="s">"</span><span class="cp"><?php</span> <span class="k">echo</span> <span class="nv">$shot</span><span class="o">-></span><span class="p">{</span><span class="s2">"image_teaser_url"</span><span class="p">};</span> <span class="cp">?></span><span class="s">"</span> <span class="na">alt=</span><span class="s">"</span><span class="cp"><?php</span> <span class="k">echo</span> <span class="nv">$shot</span><span class="o">-></span><span class="p">{</span><span class="s2">"title"</span><span class="p">};</span> <span class="cp">?></span><span class="s">"</span><span class="nt">/></span>
<span class="nt"></figure></span>
<span class="nt"></a></span>
<span class="cp"><?php</span> <span class="p">}</span> <span class="cp">?></span>
</pre></td></tr></tbody></table></code></pre></div>
<p>And the CSS that gets applied to this section of the page is as follows:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight css"><code><table class="rouge-table"><tbody><tr><td class="rouge-gutter gl"><pre class="lineno">1
2
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9
</pre></td><td class="rouge-code"><pre><span class="nc">.dribbble-shot</span> <span class="nt">img</span>
<span class="p">{</span>
<span class="nl">display</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="nb">block</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="nl">float</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="nb">left</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="nl">width</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">84px</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="nl">height</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">63px</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="nl">margin</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">6px</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="nl">border-radius</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">5px</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="p">}</span>
</pre></td></tr></tbody></table></code></pre></div>
<h1>Get It Now</h1>
<p>All in all, it's a really, really simple plugin meant for DIYers. I have no plans to update the plugin other than the expected bug fixes.</p>
<div class="ui m">
The plugin is available on WordPress.org. You may also search for it within your Wordpress plugins section and install it directly from WordPress. <br /> <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rainyshots/" class="button button-default">Download RainyShots 1.0 →</a> or <a href="https://github.com/rainypixels/RainyShots">Fork it on github →</a>
</div>
<p>Let me know what you think in the comments. Feel free to report bugs, too. And if you like the plugin, please be sure to rate it. Enjoy!</p>
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Life After Twitterhttp://rainypixels.com/words/life-after-twitter/2011-03-02T13:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<!--raw-->
<p>I broke up with Twitter just over a year ago—on January 8, 2010.</p>
<p>I use the phrase "broke up" literally. After all, my departure came complete with a ‘Dear John' letter titled, <a href="http://visitmix.com/opinions/Dear-Twitter">Dear Twitter</a>. By posting this publicly I'd finally committed to ending a tumultuous relationship. And boy, did I. I quit cold turkey and have stayed clean since then.</p>
<p>So, let's get right to the $64,000 question—Was it worth it?</p>
<p>As with most answers to $64,000 questions, a simple "yes" or "no" answer won't suffice (it's a "yes", by the way). The interesting part isn't the answer itself, but, as they say, the journey.</p>
<h1>Twitaholics Anonymous</h1>
<p>There exists considerable and justifiable concern today about <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/01/stop-the-world.html">Twitter's resemblance to a drug</a>.</p>
<p>Indeed, <a href="http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2009/08/15/twitter_addiction">Twitter addiction</a> is a <a href="http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=ldymls&xhr=t&q=twitter+addiction&cp=12&pf=p&sclient=psy&aq=0&aqi=&aql=&oq=twitter+addi&pbx=1&bav=on.1,or.&fp=e87e3794f75b2bfa">serious and growing problem</a> that's even making <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/5038203/Jennifer-Aniston-ended-relationship-with-John-Mayer-because-of-his-Twitter-obsession.html">cameos</a> in Hollywood. And, it's a particularly elusive addiction in that there are no obvious symptoms or side-effects. Like say, abusing Twitter generally doesn't provoke one to discuss philosophy with a cat. </p>
<p>To make matters worse, diagnosing a Twitter addiction is one big hit-or-miss charade. What does it mean to be "addicted"? If you can stay off Twitter for a day, does that mean you're not an addict? Or is it a week? What if you just peruse, but never send tweets?</p>
<p>My hindsight indicates that trying to determine addiction criteria is a waste of time. Each individual has a unique motivation guiding his or her Twitter usage, and the physical manifestation of the addiction varies significantly as well. <a href="http://twitter.com/scobleizer">Scoble</a> tweets tens of times an hour, for instance, but that doesn't mean he's addicted (I'll argue later that he may be quite the <em>opposite</em> of addicted). On the flipside, I'd reduced my tweeting frequency to one per day towards the end, and I still felt horribly shackled.</p>
<p>The clue to figuring out what it means to be addicted to Twitter comes from a celebrated yet unexpected book—yes, life after Twitter indeed includes all sorts of crazy things like books!—written two decades ago by a Hungarian psychology professor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.</p>
<p>Titled "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyi/dp/0060920432">Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience</a>", Mihaly shares in his book the secret to happiness, a concept he calls, you guessed it, <em>flow</em>.</p>
<h1>Conscious Flow</h1>
<p>So, what is <em>flow</em>?</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.09/czik.html">Mihaly's own words from a Wired Magazine interview</a>, "Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." Anyone who has pursued a hobby all their life—like playing the guitar, running, writing, cooking, solving puzzles, even reading—should find it pretty easy to relate to this.</p>
<p>According to Mihaly's research, the key aspect to achieving flow is our ability to control our consciousness and immerse it activities that are <em>autotelic</em>, i.e. activities that are self-contained and done without the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.</p>
<p>The common motivation behind using Twitter, however, is <em>exotelic</em>, i.e. extrinsically motivated. On Twitter, we seek validation, role-play, try to score followers, indulge in lekking, promote ourselves and our work, promote others in hopes that they'll promote us, and indulge name-your-favorite-exotelic-motive. This is not to say that any of these motives <em>couldn't</em> manifest autotelically—take Scoble who turned the activity of growing a follower count into an endurance sport; Mihaly interviewed many long-distance athletes and found them to be in a high <em>flow</em> league—but few of us have succeeded at making them autotelic.</p>
<figure class="center">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/flow.jpg" alt="Flow" title="Flow" width="700" height="300" />
<figcaption><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyi/dp/0061339202/ref=pd_sim_b_3">Flow</a> is one of the best books ever written on happiness.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It's not just that we engage exotelically, but the inevitable infinite loop of it all that's most worrisome. Twitter has the ability to gain control of our consciousness. That is, Twitter diminishes our attention span drastically. The more we are on it, the more we seem to want it. When we're away from it, we spend our time thinking about it. And, the evidence echoes in the familiar gripes of countless Twitter users who describe their social media involvement with terms usually reserved for <a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Social-Bulimia">codependent love affairs</a>.</p>
<p>But, it's unclear whether overuse of Twitter has any lasting physical or mental effects; we certainly haven't gotten to the point that <a href="http://news.softpedia.com/news/Two-Fanatic-World-of-Warctaft-Gamers-Have-Died-Becouse-Of-WoW-11821.shtml">WoW gamers</a> did a few years ago. But as most people who speak of Twitter as an infatuation already suspect, the price of the habit is opportunity cost. Twitter may not make you do crazy things, but it may make you <em>stop</em> doing many things.</p>
<p>There's nothing like a year's worth of experiences to confirm this suspicion.</p>
<h1>The Proof is in the Pudding</h1>
<figure class="left m">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/tweet.png" alt="What would you be doing if you weren't on Twitter?" title="What would you be doing if you weren't on Twitter?" width="400" height="231" />
<figcaption>A <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/smashingmag/status/32941572827910144">timely tweet</a> by Smashing Magazine a few weeks ago.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I made a quick list of things I did in 2010 that I felt went above and beyond prior years. They may not be big to others, but they were significant for me. Bear with me as this list is a means to an end.</p>
<p>I <a href="http://rainypixels.com/writings/journal/its-raining-pixels-again/">designed and launched a personal blog</a>, <a href="http://rainypixels.com/writings/journal/it-pays-to-be-bad/">started training for and competing in triathlons</a> (ironically, this was before I read <em>Flow</em> and its findings about endurance athletes), <a href="http://weareminky.com">launched a small company/side-project</a> with my wife, wrote around 15 articles, and read around thirty books (the sum total for the two years before it was, embarrassingly, <em>two</em> books). This was in addition to doing really well at my job, which is a time commitment in and unto itself.</p>
<figure class="right">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/tweets.jpg" alt="My tweets over the last year" title="My tweets over the last year" width="350" height="431" />
<figcaption>I reduced Twitter to RSS in 2010</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It's also worth noting that 2010 was also a particularly relaxing and stress-free year for me. I took two vacations (a total of three weeks), hosted family at my house for around eight weeks (this is borderline insane, and I don't recommend it), started taking ski-lessons, and even watched all the seasons of Prison Break and 24 on Netflix. OK, the last one wasn't exactly relaxing or a healthy substitute for Twitter because we were addicted to both shows and watched them in marathon fashion till our brains went numb (the astute among you notice a trend here—I have a propensity to surrender my consciousness to mindless entertainment).</p>
<p>All of these activities share one thing in common—they require focusing one's attention for long periods of time—something I couldn't dream of doing in my Twitter days because, well, I had the attention span of an oyster.</p>
<p>Admittedly, correlation is not causation, and my higher productivity levels likely have to do with many other factors—hormonal changes, better financial stability, exercise-induced endorphins, excessive Weimaraner petting, and so on. But correlation <em>is</em> correlation, and I've found a strong, almost causation-like relationship between quitting Twitter on one side and higher productivity levels and stronger personal relationships on the other.</p>
<p><h1>#TheVerdict</h1></p>
<p>So, we're clearly concluding that quitting Twitter can be a very good thing. But that's not the $64,000 question anymore, is it?</p>
<p>There's a much bigger question on our minds—a natural, deeper, even philosophical, question.</p>
<p><em>Is Twitter bad? </em></p>
<p>It turns out that we can convincingly argue both sides on this one. And, we have—<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/01/stop-the-world.html">Packer</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/weekinreview/03carr.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=carr%20twitter&st=cse&scp=1">Carr</a> are just one example of the case in point. Depending on which way we swing, we tend to pick one or the other. And then a very elegant human imperfection, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias">confirmation bias</a>, steps in to fortify our choice. We are wired to pick and then protect our binary choices—red or blue—so much so that it's the foundation for everything from our computers to our political process.</p>
<p>In a broad sense, this question we're trying to answer is not as much about Twitter as it is about the paradox that is life itself. It's a dilemma that has vexed us through the ages as evidenced by the old saying, "One man's meat is another man's poison." But if my recent experience reinforced anything, it's that the answer to such trick questions often lies somewhere on the spectrum between red and blue. The real answer is a shade of purple, which coincidentally, is the color of introspection.</p>
<p>So if we must have an answer to the question whether Twitter is bad, then let it be this—you must find the shade that helps you achieve <em>flow</em>. One where <em>you're</em> in control, not Twitter.</p>
<p>As for me, it seems I'm ready to give <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Twitter a second chance</span> myself a second chance with <a href="http://twitter.com/rainypixels">Twitter</a>.</p>
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5.5 Habits of Effective Designershttp://rainypixels.com/words/5-5-habits-of-highly-effective-designers/2011-02-18T13:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>If you can get past the mildly cheesy title, this article that I wrote for <a href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/02/18/five-and-a-half-habits-of-highly-effective-designers/6/">Smashing Magazine</a> packs in a decade's worth of the lessons I've learned in this industry.</p>
<div class="centerm">
<!--more-->
</div>
<blockquote><p>Five and a half practical habits that highly effective designers tend to share and which I’ve observed first-hand in the complicated, non-theoretical, absolutely real world.</p></blockquote>
<p class="centerm grid7 center"><a href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/02/18/five-and-a-half-habits-of-highly-effective-designers/6"> Read it on Smashing Magazine →</a></p>
It Pays to be Badhttp://rainypixels.com/words/it-pays-to-be-bad/2011-01-31T13:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<!--raw-->
<p>This is going to sound narcissistic. I can't remember the last time I was <em>really, really</em> bad at something. Then about nine months ago, I took up triathlons</p>
<p>Like most beginner triathletes, I'm not a swimmer. My idea of swimming encompassed the length you swim to get to the bar at the other end of the pool. By comparison, a ‘sprint triathlon' features an 800 yard (16 laps) swim course in a lake with hundreds of competitors (and some pretty nasty lookin' fish) kicking and splashing in your face. And that's followed by a 12 mile bike ride and a 3.1 mile run.</p>
<p>As it so happened, I wasn't a biker or a runner either when I started. I'd biked just a handful of times in the last decade. And run a total of no more than 20 miles over the same time period.</p>
<p>See, I don't jump into things like "triathlons". Don't get me wrong, I take lots of risks—I once even tried eggplant parmesan—but taking on a triathlon was more than a risk. It was plain stupid in my estimation. But, few things inspire stupidity like the pull of inspiration.</p>
<p>I owe my friend Jen the credit (and blame) for inspiring me with her personal story of beating chronic health issues and weight problems through endurance sports. And my friend and coach, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rusty-Pruden-Coaching/102920703098134">Rusty</a>, who's the nicest badass I know (actually, he's the <em>only</em> nice badass I know; seems like that's one of the rarest combination of traits one can find in people these days). Between those two poster children, my lizard brain didn't stand a chance and I decided to jump into the deep end.</p>
<figure class="left">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/bike.jpg" alt="Nishant slowly dying on a bike" title="Nishant slowly dying on a bike" width="336" height="481" />
<figcaption>Hilly Kirkland handing me my ass</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I was a finisher in the Kirkland Sprint Triathlon last September. And, even though my friends and family remain impressed by this feat, let me assure you, I wasn't very good. If you don't believe me, <a href="http://www.racecenter.com/kirklandtri/results/kirktri10.htm#overall">see for yourself</a> (I placed 398 overall out of 575 finishers).</p>
<p>The thing is that we've all been really bad at stuff because, well, we've all been kids. And despite what mom and dad said, we sucked. At reading. At swimming. At doing math. At drawing. At just about everything. Even the prodigies amongst us started out sucking. But as the wise old man (aka the <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html">Chinese mother</a> or Indian father) said, "No pain, no gain." And, what's deviously hidden in that little nugget of wisdom is that sticking with something you're bad at can have all sorts of seemingly unrelated benefits.</p>
<p>Coming back to triathlons, I figured that my training schedule of around 12-14 hours per week would require me to put my personal life and career on the back burner. Instead, it caused me to completely rethink my work-life balance. I ended up focusing my energy better; in fact, I'm actually outperforming myself at work if I compare it to how I was doing a year ago. And, it's no coincidence that I was able to kick-start a dear personal project that I had procrastinated for over three years—this very site, Rainypixels,—around the same time I was teaching myself how to swim in a lake without the fear of being consumed by mutant seaweed (and those nasty lookin' fish).</p>
<p>The older we get, the more we seem to suck at sucking at stuff. We stop picking activities where we're likely to trip and fall at the beginning. But my recent experience tells me that there's all sorts of goodness in sticking to something you're not very good at; taking on something that's drastically out of your comfort zone. You don't have pressure in such activities to outperform others—the Achilles heel on the path to happiness. Instead, you find yourself rediscovering some long-lost habits—like, practice makes perfect—and focusing on the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000W94FE6/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0060920432&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=05E38QN4EAFHEFWDWTJX">flow</a> of the activity itself. The research literally shows that this is the <em>key</em> to happiness. Not to mention, it's <a href="http://twitter.com/skywaitress/status/28308058522263552">boatloads of fun</a>.</p>
<p>For me it means sticking with triathlons this year. I plan on running at least five races. And, I look forward to what I'll look back upon at the same time next year.</p>
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Like It or Nothttp://rainypixels.com/words/like-it-or-not/2010-11-05T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>I think we live in the most interesting times because of the "like". Never have we signaled as blatantly as we signal today. What's not to like about such a time?</p>
<blockquote><p>Hidden neatly beneath the seemingly superficial surface of the "like" button are some peculiar insights about humanity. And deeper below that—our next collective challenge. </p></blockquote>
<p class="centerm grid7 center"><a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Like-It-or-Not"> Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>
Don’t have a Cowhttp://rainypixels.com/words/dont-have-a-cow/2010-10-27T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<!--raw-->
<p>If you blinked in the last couple of weeks, chances are that you missed one of the most overhyped PR events in the recent past—Gap's logo redesign attempt.</p>
<p>Inspiring online engagement akin to Obama's social media campaign—from <a href="http://blog.iso50.com/logos/gap-redesign-contest/">privately run</a> <a href="http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/design-better-gap-logo-community-project-54693">logo contests</a> to <a href="http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/10/07/gap-pr-fail-twitter-lets-loose-with-fashion-satire/">dueling twitter accounts</a> posing as the old and new Gap logos themselves—this incident hit the collective social media nerve square in the humerus. In less than a week, Gap went from <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marka-hansen/the-gaps-new-logo_b_754981.html">introducing a new logo</a>, to dealing with the public outcry with <a href="http://www.facebook.com/gap?v=wall&story_fbid=159977040694165">a crowd-sourcing contest</a>, to <a href="http://www.gapinc.com/public/Media/Press_Releases/med_pr_GapLogoStatement10112010.shtml">replacing the new logo with the old one</a>. <em>idsgn</em> delivers <a href="http://www.idsgn.org/posts/gap-turns-to-crowdsourcing/">a wonderful chronological event report</a> if you're interested.</p>
<figure class="center">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/gap_logos1.jpg" alt="Old and New Logos" title="Old/New" width="600" height="305" />
<figcaption>The new (left) & the old (right)</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But as designers, social media experts, and branding czars rejoice in the victory of <em>The People vs. Corporate Ineptness</em>, the true victor and beneficiary seems to be a completely unrelated player—Religious Idolatry.</p>
<h1>Logos & Religion</h1>
<p>The religious parallel shouldn't come as a surprise.</p>
<p>After all, the the word "logo" comes from the Greek word "Logos". Among its many meanings, Christian theology identifies it as the <a href="http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/logos.htm">human incarnate of God</a>—Jesus Christ. Etymologically, "logo" almost literally means "God". Ironic, but certainly appropriate.</p>
<p>Over time, the status of a successful company's logo tends to divinity. Apple, Coca-Cola, UPS, AT&T, Ford, BMW, Pepsi, Ralph Lauren and as we recently learned, Gap, are just a few examples of brands whose logos have transcended graphic representation into a religious realm. They've earned adjectives like "iconic"; unsurprisingly, the word "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon">icon</a>", too, means "a work of religious art". You can begin seeing how logos can come to embody characteristics of <a href="http://www.hinduwebsite.com/idols.asp">idols like those in Hinduism</a>. </p>
<p>As it turns out, Gap was not the first casualty of attempted idol surgery, and certainly won't be the last.</p>
<h1>History Repeating Itself</h1>
<p>If Gap would have done their research, they'd have found a very similar episode in 2009 featuring another major brand. I'm referring, of course, to the Pepsi rebranding incident. </p>
<p>Not only did the new Pepsi logo fail to impress the disciples at large, but to make matters worse, a 27-page internal pitch by the design firm, Arnell Group, leaked to the Web. The document, titled <a href="http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/20090521-firefoxIconQA/pepsi_gravitational_field.pdf">Breathtaking</a>, almost schizophrenically attempted to relate the Pepsi logomark to everything from the Mona Lisa to the Earth's Geodynamo. It made the Arnell group come across as deranged perverts who had not only manhandled one of the world's most beloved idols, but laughed hysterically through its pillaging.</p>
<p>The idolatry backlash was fierce and merciless. If there were ever a social media equivalent of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayodhya_dispute">Babri Masjid riots</a>, this was probably it.</p>
<figure class="center">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/breathtaking1.png" alt="Breathtaking" title="Breathtaking" width="700" height="514" />
<figcaption>A few pages from <a href="http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/20090521-firefoxIconQA/pepsi_gravitational_field.pdf">Breathtaking</a>—The absurd Pepsi rebranding creative brief</figcaption>
</figure>
<h1>The Moral</h1>
<p>Perhaps the most curious aspect of idolatry of any form is that it leaves the non-participants stupefied. While a fraction of the impassioned unite to protect their idol, the rest of the world watches confused. And, the majority? They remain clueless about an ongoing conflict.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, it's tempting to draw all sorts of lessons from such episodes, and the latest Gap episode was no exception.</p>
<p>Lessons around how to practice PR in a world with <a href="http://www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com/">The Social Network</a>. Or, around the need for more proficient and introspective designers. Or, the ramifications of out-of-touch leadership in corporations. The list goes on.</p>
<p>But, maybe the real lesson is that when a brand becomes an idol, all bets are off and nobody really wins. And, as this hysterical scene from the new TV show <a href="http://www.nbc.com/outsourced/">Outsourced</a> demonstrates, maybe it's best to let idols just be.</p>
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It’s Raining Pixels Againhttp://rainypixels.com/words/its-raining-pixels-again/2010-10-13T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<!--raw-->
<p>The seemingly insurmountable test of every personal project is your ability to deliver something that satisfies the worst critic of them all—<em>you</em>. The bar is virtually unachievable. After all, it must address every complaint you’ve ever had designing something for a third party <em>and</em> it must simultaneously delight you and world.</p>
<p>The Rainypixels journey became somewhat of a joke among my inner circle of friends. And for good reason. I started talking about launching a personal site in 2005—over five years ago. And since then, I've attempted to do so bi-annually only to abandon each attempt early in the design phase. The emotions I experienced always traversed a path similar to what Josh describes early in his article, <a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Social-Bulimia">Social Bulimia</a>. </p>
<p>But, something changed recently. </p>
<p>Somehow, not only was I able to successfully build and launch this site, but also satisfy my own expectations. And in the process I stumbled upon the simple little two-part secret to designing successfully for oneself—a topic fitting for the inaugural post of this site.
</p>
<h1>Half The Battle</h1>
<p>As is often the case, the recipe for success was hidden in another's wisdom. Matt Brown wrote in his article, <a href="http://visitmix.com/articles/Discovering-Trustworthiness">Discovering Trustworthiness</a>—</p>
<blockquote class="quotation"><p>Even today, it remains enormously difficult to design and launch a successful, well-designed website. Why? Because design is about much more than tactics and implementation. It's about answering the <strong>what</strong> question—aka, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve? It’s about finding the core question that frames a project.</p></blockquote>
<p>I decided to heed Matt’s advice for this project and rounded up all the possible goals for Rainypixels—the <em>whats</em>. I listed them shamelessly—everything from creating a blogazine-style site like <a href="http://jasonsantamaria.com">Jason's</a> to a comprehensive section of professional highlights. Once they were all up on my whiteboard, I painstakingly prioritized them like one of those packrats from the TV Show, Hoarders; only instead of physical stuff, I was sifting through and stacking project goals I’d hoarded over a decade.</p>
<p>In the end, I was left with one:</p>
<blockquote><p>A respectable destination for my past and future writings.</p></blockquote>
<p>In other words, I’d determined that the <strong>most</strong> important goal of the Rainypixels project was to give me the ability to write on the Web. Simply put, <em>a blog</em>. And this goal trumped all other goals, meaningful and frivolous, alike.</p>
<p>Discovering <em>the what</em> is half the battle.</p>
<h1>Winning the War</h1>
<p>Based on experience and taking into account the simplicity of the primary goal, i.e. to create a respectable blog, I gave myself 10 hours to design the entire site—that is, I had 10 hours to go <a href="http://visitmix.com/articles/the-anatomy-of-web-design">from a goal to IA to full-fidelity comps complete with copy</a>. I disclosed this information to my wife, Pita, inviting an unspoken contract between us. It allowed her to pay me surprise visits whenever I was cooped up in my home office "designing", and if it seemed like I was veering off path, she could crack her whip. </p>
<p>Between my determination—admittedly, it was not unlike that of an addict trying to quit—and Pita's timely interventions, I was able to stay the path. They helped me steer clear of the hoarded aspirations that I mentioned earlier. They also helped me lower the bar <a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Thought-for-the-day-Nothings-Perfect">from perfect</a> to realistic during every phase of the project. </p>
<figure class="center l">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/comps1.jpg" alt="Early design comps for Rainypixels" title="Comps" width="800" height="778" />
<figcaption>A couple of early design comps</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even though designers love to complain about working with clients and stakeholders, there’s a tremendous hidden benefit of client projects—they almost always come with some combination of limitations. And whether it’s budget, feature scope, art direction preferences, or technical requirements, the limitations always have the effect of reigning in the runaway idealist in every designer. This dynamic forces a realistic answer to <em>the what</em> question. It is also one that must be emulated if we wish our most personal design projects to see the light of day.</p>
<p>Committing to <em>the what</em> with true discipline is what lets you win the war.</p>
<h1>The Anti-Climax</h1>
<p>After all these years of searching for the secret behind designing successfully for oneself, the answer turned out to be as obvious as the snout on a Weimaraner’s face—answer <em>the what</em>, and then commit to it with true discipline. </p>
<p>Fate, it seems, loves irony. Nonetheless, the Rainypixels journey seems to have met a happy ending. As I sit here typing this, I feel I’ve understood a little more about design, life and myself. And the best part is that now I have a <em>real</em> place to share it.</p>
<p>So, <a href="http://rainypixels.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/rainypixels/rss_ga.php">grab a seat</a>, make yourself comfortable, and don't forget to <a href="http://rainypixels.com/wordpress/writings/journal/its-raining-pixels-again/#leave-a-comment">say hello</a> below.</p>
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The Perfect Chai Recipehttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-perfect-chai-recipe/2010-10-13T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>Chai is Hindi for “tea”. Thanks to Starbucks, though, the word “chai” has become synonymous with what is known in India as masala (“spiced”) chai.</p>
<p>The recipe that follows is for masala chai. I learned it from my wife (you can <a href="http://www.bornhungrymag.com/2012/05/chai-chai-again/">read the full account at Born Hungry</a>), and have perfected it over the last couple of years. It takes less that ten minutes to prepare, and delivers one of the most refreshing drinks in existence.</p>
<p>Don’t take my word for it, though. Try it yourself.</p>
<h1>Ingredients <span class="ampersand">&</span> Utensils</h1>
<p>Before we begin, here's what you'll need to make two full-ish coffee mugs of tea—</p>
<blockquote><p>1.5 cup water, 1 cup whole milk, 5 cardamoms, 15 peppercorns, 1 stick of cinnamon, 5 cloves, 2.5 teaspoons black tea powder (aka, loose leaf tea, like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lipton-Black-Loose-pound-Boxes/dp/B000EM6PC6/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=grocery&qid=1286898287&sr=1-3">Lipton</a>), sugar, spice grinder, strainer, measuring cup, and cooking pot.</p></blockquote>
<h1>The Recipe</h1>
<div class="center grid2 l">
<figure>
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/011.jpg" alt="" title="" height="385" width="385"/>
<figcaption><strong>1. </strong> Assemble the secret spices—5 cardamoms, 10 (normal) to 15 (spicy) peppercorns, one stick of cinnamon and 5 cloves. </figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/021.jpg" alt="" title="" height="385" width="385"/>
<figcaption><strong>2. </strong>Grind the spices to help bring out the flavor later during preparation.</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<div class="center grid2 l">
<figure>
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/031.jpg" alt="" title="" height="385" width="385"/>
<figcaption><strong>3. </strong>Add ground spices, 2.5 teaspoons of tea powder, and 1.5 cups of water to the pot. Bring to boil.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/041.jpg" alt="" title="" height="385" width="385"/>
<figcaption><strong>4. </strong>Once the mixture is boiling, add in the milk. Continue heating till the mixture with milk just starts boiling. At this point, remove the pot from the stove.</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<div class="center grid2 l">
<figure>
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/051.jpg" alt="" title="" height="385" width="385"/>
<figcaption><strong>5. </strong>Pour the tea into serving cups (preferably ones with some personality) through a strainer that catches everything but the liquid.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/061.jpg" alt="" title="" height="385" width="385"/>
<figcaption><strong>6. </strong>Add 1.5 teaspoons sugar (more for the sweet-toothed among you) to each cup, stir & serve!</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
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Weimaraners & Separation Anxietyhttp://rainypixels.com/words/weimaraners-and-separation-anxiety/2010-10-13T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>I'm one of the gullible masses that got suckered into Weimaraner obsession by <a href="http://www.google.com/images?q=william+wegman&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=HGayTMPCGIy2sAPGwfCLDA&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CDwQsAQwAA&biw=1440&bih=803">William Wegman's evil photography portfolio</a>. I knew I wanted one the moment I saw his first photograph. And, Dean Allen's <a href="http://www.textism.com/oliver/daily">The Daily Oliver</a> certainly didn't help rescue me from my impending addiction.</p>
<p>As it turns out, pictures speak a thousand words, but the resultant prose is often deceiving. Even though it looks exactly like one, the Weimaraner often feels like it's not a breed of dog and instead more like a gifted child… with special needs.</p>
<p>This article is about coping with one common special need of Weimaraners—separation anxiety</p>
<h1>Mr. Sensitivo</h1>
<p>Despite the prevailing stereotype, it's worth noting that Weimaraners are not anxious. They're <em>sensitive</em>. It is true that often exude anxious behavior, but this is usually a symptom of their sensitive natures. This is a very subtle, but important distinction that defines the ability of a human to understand <a href="http://insideofadog.com/">the umwelt</a> of a Weimaraner and subsequently be a good owner.</p>
<figure class="center cw">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/adorable1.jpg" alt="Yoshi Blue Kothary" title="Adorable Yoshi" width="640" height="429" />
<figcaption>Yoshi Blue sulking beautifully after he was attacked by our cat.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A common manifestation of sensitivity in Weims is separation anxiety—this is when your dog feels so abandoned when left home alone that he resorts to externally and intrinsically destructive behavior. Interestingly, if you google the term "separation anxiety", you'll find hundreds of articles about how it manifests in human children and how to get your child past it. Indeed, separation anxiety is a common human disorder and it manifests in a very similar way in canines.</p>
<p>The key to treating separation anxiety in a Weimaraner is that <em>there is no master key</em>. You can't pull theories out of a book or regurgitated by experts and expect them to solve the problem.</p>
<p>Let me offer up our own experience to illustrate this point.</p>
<h1>Discovering Yoshi's Disorder</h1>
<p>We would leave Yoshi at home in his crate (<a href="http://www.inch.com/%7Edogs/cratetraining.html">crate-training</a> is a well-researched, and tried and tested methodology to raise dogs) when we were at work. It worked at first, but within a few weeks we started coming home to Yoshi covered in pee. We figured it was because he was still a puppy and had a small bladder, but we soon discovered what it really was.</p>
<p>One Saturday, we crated him a few minutes after he'd relieved himself in the yard and then left the house to walk to a nearby coffee shop. We left him a chew toy and a pillow to distract him. But we had to turn back within a few minutes because we forgot something at home.</p>
<figure class="left sm">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/crate1.jpg" alt="Yoshi has an accident in the crate" title="Crate-training" width="386" height="653" />
<figcaption>Yoshi helping me clean the crate.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p> When we entered the room, we found Yoshi in a mess of feathers in the crate, covered in pee and barking. He was also shaking.</p>
<p>At this point, it became clear to us that Yoshi had a problem that was bigger than we had been willing to acknowledge (we later learned from some quick searches online that it was indeed separation anxiety). We stopped leaving him home alone and began taking him everywhere with us. I started taking him to work and when we went out, he'd come along and stick around in the car. We found that leaving him alone in the car didn't freak him out. He just climbed onto the driver seat and took a nap awaiting our return.</p>
<p>But as you can imagine, the liability of taking a Weimaraner everywhere with you can be both taxing and limiting. Our patience waning, we decided to bring home a behavioral expert. She concluded that we should get a smaller crate that confined him (the theoretical reason is that it makes the dog feel more secure), move it to another location in the house, and possibly cover it with a sheet so he feels even more secure. </p>
<p>Suffice to say, her advice proved to be as ridiculous as it first sounded to us. As a side-note, we have an extra dog crate if you need one.</p>
<h1>How We Beat Separation Anxiety <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Beat Us</span></h1>
<p>What finally solved the separation anxiety problem is something that makes no sense when you consider dog behavior gospel. However, if you think of Yoshi as a human child with special needs, it makes perfect sense.</p>
<p>One day, Pita, my wife, somehow managed to convince me to leave Yoshi free at home while we were out. She'd been arguing for a while (from gut instinct) that Yoshi might be more open to such a situation. But with images of Weimaraners digging through drywall firmly plastered in my brain, this seemed like a preposterous idea to me. Nonetheless, I agreed to go along with it so long as I would be allowed to set up a nanny cam that would let us keep watch on him remotely. </p>
<p>We positioned the camera to give us the most encompassing view of the room. Then, we left our cats, Mango and Izzy at home to keep him company, and left the house with Pita frantically refreshing the iPhone browser window pointed at the webcam feed in the passenger seat as we drove away to a party.</p>
<p>What ensued was shocking, hysterical and a godsend.</p>
<p>First the animals walked single file into the kitchen looking for scraps of food; as a side note, simply by observing the ordering of the line, we finally learned that Izzy is at the top of the food chain, while Yoshi, unsurprisingly, is at the bottom. So much for Weims having "prey instinct" (another generalized breed myth).</p>
<figure class="center cw">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/siblings1.jpg" alt="Yoshi, Izzy and Mango" title="Yoshi, Izzy and Mango" width="640" height="428" />
<figcaption>Three siblings—Yoshi, Izzy & Mango</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Next, they all moved to the couch and each found a comfortable spot on it. It was clear that Yoshi was showing pack behavior; it just so happened that the other two creatures were cats that were mentally stable and served as good role models.</p>
<p>For the next hour or so, they alternated between taking naps and wandering around the house looking for trouble. Finally, Yoshi settled down on the couch next to Mango and slept for almost four hours, only waking up to shift positions.</p>
<p>Yes, it was the first time we'd left him alone at home in almost a year. And our methods flew in the face of everything we'd read and heard from experts. We didn't crate him. We didn't leave him any chew toys. And we certainly didn't ease him into getting comfortable with being alone.</p>
<h1>Almost a Weimaraner Ambassador</h1>
<p>Today, Yoshi is almost perfectly behaved when left home alone, spare the occasional bout of gutting a cushion—not any ol' cushion, but one specific cushion that we've dubbed the "decoy pillow". We re-stuff it whenever we come back home and replace it for future Weim use. We're convinced that this minor destructive behavior isn't separation anxiety as much as it's him throwing a tantrum (we've even caught it on camera—he guts the pillow and then takes a long nap in the foamy mess he created). Every so often, he'll go find a shoe, strategically place it on the couch, and then proceed to take a nap next to it.</p>
<p>Whenever we come home to such delinquent behavior, we find him peeking out from under the dining table (he's very good at punishing himself) waiting to see how we respond to his silent threat involving the abducted shoe.</p>
<h1>Finally</h1>
<figure class="center cw">
<img src="http://rainypixels.com/img/words/ugly_grin1.jpg" alt="Yoshi smiling" title="Smile!" width="640" height="480" />
<figcaption>Right side up—Weimaraner. Upside down—Hell on Earth</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Weimaraners are the kind of dogs that stare intently into your eyes not only as you speak to them, but also when you're not talking. They exude a longing to understand their human companions, and our commitment to discard this sensitivity as our own anthropomorphic flaw seems more like a classic example of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias">confirmation bias</a> to me than anything else.</p>
<p>Most of Yoshi's behavioral problems seemed to disappear overnight the moment we approached solutions that factored in his sensitive and perceptive nature.</p>
<p>So, if your dog is suffering from separation anxiety and the textbooks haven't been helping, then you may be oversimplifying the problem at hand.</p>
<p>It may just be that your canine needs treatment more fitting of man's best friend.</p>
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Article vs. Section Madnesshttp://rainypixels.com/words/article-vs-section-weve-finally-gone-mad/2010-08-12T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>Who the hell wrote this spec?</p>
<blockquote><p>Two weeks ago I decided to use the controversial HTML5 structural tags, <article> <span class="ampersand">&</span> <section>, in the real world. A week ago I found the first white hair on my head.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Article-vs-Section-Weve-Finally-Gone-Mad"> Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>
Less is More, More or Lesshttp://rainypixels.com/words/less-is-more-more-or-less/2010-07-10T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>There's a lot more I want to say about the topic of intuition. It fascinates me more than anything else I've come across in the last couple of years in my meanderings through cognitive psychology. This is a start, though —</p>
<blockquote><p>Research shows that design decisions based on gut feelings, simple reasoning, and rules of thumb can be as effective, if not more, than those based on complex analyses.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Less-is-More-More-or-Less"> Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>
On Designers & Dolphinshttp://rainypixels.com/words/designers-be-happy-youre-not-dolphins/2010-05-13T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>A bit of a rant —</p>
<blockquote><p>I recently watched <a href="http://www.thecovemovie.com/">The Cove</a>—the much-heralded documentary about the covert annual slaughter of Dolphins in Japan. Oddly, I walked away feeling sorry for designers.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Designers-Be-Happy-Youre-Not-Dolphins"> Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>
The Blinding Light of Expertshttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-blinding-light-of-experts/2010-04-14T12:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>A friend happened to be at a conference where the keynote speaker, a well-known "expert", in the area of visual thinking, decided to utilize my <a href="http://visitmix.com/work/descry/awebsitenameddesire/">A Website Named Desire</a> poster to make a point about how <i>not</i> to design an effective infographic.</p>
<p>Right.</p>
<blockquote><p>We love experts. After all, they simplify life by sharing with us the wisdom they’ve acquired through years of hard work. What’s not to love about that? Well, other than the fact that experts are wrong—a lot—it’s a pretty good deal.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/The-Blinding-Light-of-Experts">Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>
The Future of Wireframeshttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-future-of-wireframes/2010-03-02T13:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>The wireframing process hasn't been the same for me since the MIX Online redesign. Hear me out —</p>
<blockquote><p>As we move into the next decade of web design, it's time for us to reevaluate our understanding of information architecture, specifically, wireframes—a tried and tested user experience staple. </p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://visitmix.com/Articles/The-Future-of-Wireframes">Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>
Predictable Designhttp://rainypixels.com/words/predictable-design/2010-02-22T13:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>I have an unhealthy fascination for organizations, particularly, how organizations (and their typical dysfunctions) affect the process of building software. This article that I wrote for UX Mag summarizes some of my thoughts.</p>
<p>And, of course, there's a musical analogy.</p>
<blockquote><p>The question—How do you make a design deliberate, objective and predictable—has a seemingly simple answer that's rooted in the most unexpected art form—rap.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://uxmag.com/strategy/predictable-design">Read it on UX Mag →</a></p>
The Anatomy of Web Designhttp://rainypixels.com/words/the-anatomy-of-web-design/2010-02-18T13:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>This one took me <i>ages</i> to write, but I'm glad I documented it. So many harsh reminders about the difference between theory and practice.</p>
<blockquote><p>An elaborate case study on the MIX Online redesign process. We bare it all—the good, the bad & the ugly. With no respect for word-count, I'd recommend approaching this one with a nice pot of coffee. </p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://visitmix.com/Articles/The-Anatomy-of-Web-Design"> Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>
Kindle vs. iPad vs. Weimaranerhttp://rainypixels.com/words/kindle-vs-ipad-vs-weimaraner/2010-01-29T13:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>I got a little tired of people comparing apples and oranges. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right?</p>
<blockquote><p>The iPad's true contender isn't the Kindle or the netbook as some pundits would have you believe. It's the immaculately engineered German canine— the Weimaraner. </p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Kindle-vs-iPad-vs-Weimaraner"> Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>
Dear Twitterhttp://rainypixels.com/words/dear-twitter/2010-01-08T13:30:00+05:302018-10-10T11:45:10+05:30Nishant Kothary<p>A break-up letter to Twitter—the exciting yet uncontrollable mistress that has rendered many of us addicts tweeting uncontrollably into codependency. No more, Twitter. No more. </p>
<blockquote><p>I've been thinking about this for some time and I think it's time we talk, Twitter.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Dear-Twitter"> Read it on MIX Online →</a></p>