In news that will be interesting to practically no one, I’m going to move to a bi-weekly schedule on posts. I’m struggling a bit to keep up the blog along with the paying work and the time-sensitive non-paying work. I hope that fewer posts will mean better posts!

With Christmas and then New Year’s upon us, I’m taking a couple of weeks off posting. See you all in 2016!

In the USA, it’s Thanksgiving Day. And although I try to write these posts weeks in advance, I thought I’d take this opportunity to give myself a break. That this break is on September 27th is immaterial.

I got a copy of the fourth edition of About Face for Christmas because obviously that’s the kind of gift that I would appreciate. I read the second edition almost ten years ago and it’s a book that stuck with me over the years.

The thing I valued most when I read that book was that it altered the way I thought about design problems. The example I always reach for is the extended riff on the ubiquitous “Save” button you find in things like Word. It’s a button that you have to click (or a menu command you must choose) to commit any changes you make to the computer’s permanent memory. Sure, there is auto-save functionality but even in 2015, it is… not quite satisfactory.

Cooper argued that this is a button that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. Why doesn’t our software simply remember everything we did? It should save everything as we go. If we make mistakes, it can be corrected by also having extremely effective “Undo” functionality.

The key idea here isn’t to design a better “Save” button. The better design is nothing at all. The idea that sometimes it’s better to design nothing at all has stuck with me over the years. I’m pleased that the core of this idea, saving everything as you go, has been incorporated into more tools (though notably still not Word).

As I write this, it’s Friday, November 7, 2014. The season/series finale of the 8th season/series of Doctor Who is tomorrow. Or, rather, it’s a couple of days away. I’ll be watching it on Sunday morning after downloading it from iTunes.

This will be the third year in a row that I’ve watched Doctor Who through legal means. I haven’t had cable in a long time, and for a few years, I found ways to watch the show as it aired rather than waiting for it to come out on DVD. I realized, as many people do, that I would gladly pay for a hassle-free way to watch this (and other) shows.

Just to be clear: Waiting until Sunday morning to watch this show on iTunes or Amazon sucks. In the case of Amazon, it really sucked this year, because their season pass was going to force me to pay an unknown price for not just the actual episodes, but also for all the bonus materials. Still, I’m on board with paying for something I want to watch and having a frictionless method to get it.

That’s the same reason I pay for Spotify and why I’ve bought old games on Steam that I’ve already owned on CD-ROM and why the thought of being able to subscribe to HBO GO intrigues me.

As this post gets published, it won’t be long before the Christmas special, and I have to solve the problem of how to watch it all over again. Convenience matters. Convenience sells.

I find the aesthetics of Google’s Material design attractive (even if it’s not my favorite thing ever), but it takes some getting used to. What really caught me recently was the “make a new document” button in Google Docs.

When it comes down to it, it’s not the symbol itself that’s a big problem—I can make sense of a plus sign as something that adds another doc.

Mostly, it’s the placement of that button that gets me. The last iteration of Google Docs put the button in the upper left corner. With the redesign, it migrated to the opposite corner, so that was one change that threw me off.

Another part is that the button changed from a notice-grabbing, contrast-ey red to the same blue that everything else in the interface is. I guess they’re relying the contrast of blue against grey rather than a nice red that pops out of the page as a whole.

Lastly, Google changed from a text label to a plus sign. The plus sign makes enough sense when you think about it (although, as an aside, I’m skeptical of just using symbols rather than labels). Without the color and sensical placement of the button, though, there was no reason for me to think about what the plus sign meant. It wasn’t even that I found the button confusing—I simply didn’t think about it until I realized I didn’t know how to create a new document.

Does the user experience field need professional organizations? I’m not sure.

I put a lot of time into my local UXPA chapter (back when it was just the UPA), and more recently I’ve worked with the international UXPA. I did so to help myself network, but also because I take professional development pretty seriously. Of course, there was also an element of doing good for my local community. in the 2000s, Southeast Michigan had a vibrant and highly active UXPA chapter that put on 6-10 meetings per year and participated in local conferences.

As I write this, I’m getting ready to go to a holiday mixer organized by the local UXPA, ACM SIGCHI, and STC chapters. It’s an informal event, in that it consists of showing up and trying to take over part of a bar, and one thing I look forward to is talking to some of the other locals who have been or who are active in our local professional scene.

I expect the major topic to be the same problem that we’ve had to address for the last few years: What the heck are we doing?

Our CHI and UXPA chapters can’t find officers. Without officers, there aren’t enough people to plan events, which usually involves soliciting speakers, finding venues, and figuring out how to provide food. Our local chapters are solely funded by registration fees for events, so without putting on events, there’s no income, making it harder and riskier to plan further events.

It could be that the world has moved on and there simply isn’t as much of a need for the old organizations, with their concept of membership and formal titles. A key feature of Michigan’s UX professional scene is that the UXPA and CHI chapters covered the entire state, which consists of multiple clusters of UX people living and working at least an hour’s drive away from each other. It could be the case that it’s easier in 2014 to get UX-related training and to meet your neighborhood colleagues without spending a couple of hours on the road. It could be the case that there are more readily available infrastructures for organizing your own events, like Facebook and Meetup, than there were 10 years ago.

Given these factors—and note, these are just the ones I could think of on the spot—it could be the case that there just isn’t a need for formal organizations anymore, and that UX professionals will find ways to get together. Speaking as the co-chair of Ignite UX Michigan for the last two years, it would have been practically impossible to organize that event without the infrastructure of the UXPA and CHI chapters. They have large mailing lists built up over several years, and they have bank accounts—something that’s super helpful once you get into the world of sponsors and having assets owned by an organization rather than an individual.

It seems like at any given time, there are only so many people in the world with both the energy and the time to take on volunteer work with existing organizations or founding their own or just doing their own thing to organize professional activities. Over the last few years, those people haven’t been involved in our legacy organizations, but they’ve been busy nonetheless. Lately, Michigan has seen more localized groups and a mixture of formal and informal meetings.

I suppose I come down on the side of “these institutions are worth saving.” I’m sure that at least part of the reason is that I have invested my own time into the local UXPA chapter, but I also know that formal institutions offer remarkably useful infrastructures for building large and sustainable events and, through volunteering to help plan events, an opportunity for those who find networking painful and false to do so in a structured and slightly-less-painful way.