Chief Wireframe Officer

I was interviewing for a job earlier this year with what I thought was a pretty great sounding place. The CEO had a solid reputation for good work, and some of my former colleagues had worked with him. They called me and wanted to know if I wanted to interview for a Chief Design Officer position.

CDO. 

Let me tell you, the part of me that loves titles... was on board . That part of me saw this as a huge jump, a prestigious one. It sounded great (still does!) And the interview process started off really strongly, too. A couple of phone conversations, sharing my portfolio, and then I was talking with the fellow's executive assistant (who mattered in this case) and an HR person.

The conversation started out strong, speaking about strategy and the role of design in this organization. I spoke about how design has to align with business goals, and how obvious it was that this company got it  because they saw design as a core competency. And they nodded and smiled. Then they asked me a question.

"So, what tool do you use for wireframes?" 

They explained a little more about the job: the CEO would come up with ideas (requirements) and need someone to make wireframes to handoff to development. There were other designers on this team too, so there was a management component, but nothing terribly formal.

My heart sunk. This? This was a CDO?

I did answer, of course, that I could make wireframes in whatever tool, who really gives a fuck. (I didn't say "fuck", but maybe I should have.) I went on to add, "But that doesn't touch on what all of design can or should do. Wireframes are a tiny aspect of it, and sure they're important, but I would be loathe to make something without proper user research." 

"Oh." 

It was clear what this company wanted. But it was equally clear, maybe even moreso, that I knew what I wanted. It was a job where design and research are taken seriously, and where everyone on the team gets it - no fighting nor multiple-year-long campaigns to "fight for UX" involved. 

At that job, I would have had to do that every day. It would have bored me to tears and not challenged me at all. 

I did not hear from that company after our talk, but I didn't mind it in the least.

They wanted a CDO who wasn't really a C, a D, or an O. They wanted a person to make wireframes. 

36

Today I turn 36. It is a year without glamour, without any additional privileges by itself, and simply is. 

My previous year on this planet, in this life, was an amazing one. I learned an incredible amount. I fucked up a lot. I succeeded. I started to allow me to be me. I was scared, happy, thrilled, excited, bored, tired, loved, loving, hated, disrespected, respected, admired, disgusted, disillusioned, befriended, comforted. All of that, and millions more things, billions. 

And I want to share 36 things with you. These are things that I currently believe. I may not believe them next year, and probably didn't 2 or 5 or 10 years ago. I love lists. Indulge me.

1. I am way too big to be defined by labels applied by myself or others.
2. Being present in every moment is supremely important and incredibly challenging. 
3. Life is too fucking short to be in a job filled with fighting. 
4. I'm very privileged, and I want to use that privilege to truly help others. 
5. Often I say things before I truly feel them and believe them.
6. I have to inspire myself, be my own hero, be my own best advocate - always.
7. The past is fixed but the way we interact with it can be changed.
8. Everything, everyone is always changing.
9. Guilty pleasures are bullshit. Love what you love. 
10. No one is keeping score in any way.
11. Exercise has been empowering and transformative in ways I could not have ever predicted. 
12. Every single person I encounter in a day, and every single person I do not encounter, is fully formed with her own dreams, wishes, beliefs, concerns, joys, suffering, and love.
13. Self-awareness is power.
14. The struggles of parenting are outweighed, significantly, by the inspiration and beauty of seeing my son live his life. 
15. Nearly everything I thought was important is not really that important.
16. Not choosing something is actually choosing something; non-decision is a decision.
17. All of the things I thought I couldn't do are things I actually can do.
18. I care about aesthetics in myself, others, and objects. 
19. I now have a good sense of what makes a good boss and what does not make a good boss; I've worked for both and all types in between.
20. I am an introvert but love talking with people. 
21. Dismissing ideas and people out of hand is foolish.
22. Ask, ask, ask.
23. Compassion rules.
24. I am hard on myself, really hard.
25. My body knows what's up.
26. Gender is not binary. 
27. Thinking something is very different than feeling it, which in turn is very different than acting on it. 
28. There have been some people close to me all this time and I have caused them pain and hurt. 
29. Death only changes a relationship with a person; that relationship carries on. 
30. I can and should surprise myself more often.
31. I can and should surprise others more often. It's fun. 
32. Some things pass and some things stay; this doesn't mean the things that are here will always be here. 
33. I drink a lot of water.
34. Everything is going to be okay, and everything is okay.
35. Death may come at any moment, and I will strive to always be ready for it. 
36. People are not machines. 

May these 36 thoughts spread and bloom and fly away from me. 

FOMO

Yesterday I posted a simple tweet saying, "FOMO." You know, fear of missing out. 

It was a gut reaction to what seemed to be happening in everyone else's lives: fun things. Adventures. New opportunities. New kids. It felt a little weird to me, very uncomfortable, and right away a part of me brought up this invisible scorecard I have... and I wasn't "winning" (whatever that  means). Whatever I was doing with my life, in that moment, wasn't "enough".

Here's the thing: it's not true! Not at all. And I bet it isn't true for anyone reading this. Ups and downs happen, and they're as natural as the way water ebbs and flows. But we can strive to be mindful of these down moments, explore them, stand inside of them, and then take action on them.

When I really sat with my FOMO, a new fear spoke up: the fear of missing out on my own life. I was able to meditate on that very briefly and feel it: while present in my mind, it didn't ring true. I'm being myself, and still practicing being myself in each moment. Not fear - presence.

Presence is the opposite of missing out. It's being in. 

Replay

There are events in my life I replay in my head at a moment's notice. Sometimes it's  great stuff, like my wedding day or the day I met my son, and the way I feel when I'm replaying those moments is hard to articulate - but I feel warm, comfortable, confident. 

Then there's the shitty stuff. My brain is filled with memories of embarrassing and sad situations from my life too. Sometimes I replay these and until recently, I never tried to do anything with them. I just watched them play. I'd be in the car, and think about something that happened in 2nd grade, and it would just be overwhelming . Not to the point of pulling over, but something that would absolutely take my energy right out of the present. Haunted me.

But there's something I realized recently and shared:

The events of the past are fixed, yes. But the way we experience them and relate to them is always in flux because that happens *now*.

— Paul McAleer (@paulmcaleer) September 23, 2013

Expanding on that a bit: the way that I've seen these memories in my head is like I'm watching TV. It's me on the screen, I can see it, but I can't interact with it.

And then I was taught that I can, in fact, interact with it. While I can no longer change what happened - ever - I can always change my relationship in the present with that memory. So the things that I've held with me, the things I deem embarrassing, are chances for me to step in with who I am now and react differently. 

Because I'm a geek I like to compare this to time travel. I can go anyplace in the past, and I can't change the events, but I can interact with what's happening knowing that - to quote Faraday from LOST - whatever happened, happened. 

So what's in the interaction? Usually me trying to be more compassionate with myself, honestly. Not being so hard on myself or, if I am hard on myself, accepting that and trying to understand why that is.  In contrast, I relive the good stuff to just feel good in a moment. Sometimes I need that comfort.

All that said, this idea has significantly changed the way I think about the past. I respect it. The script is written. But I can reinterpret it now, and I bet I'll reinterpret it differently in 5 years, 5 decades (hopefully!), or even 5 minutes. We're always changing, always. 

Locked Inside

I've been waiting for us to break out of a lot of the computing metaphors we've held dear. 

For decades we've lived with computer screens that tried to add depth by simulating... well... something. Some magical desktop where folders took up the same apparent physical space as a trash can. (One of those must be really tiny!) And then there were windows on top of all of this. Layers upon layers upon layers of boxes. Everything has always seemed off, just a bit. Really, there was no real-world equivalent.

This ran counter to early home computer hardware which, initially, resembled a bloated typewriter due to the dominance of its keyboard.

The VIC-20. My first computer, from 1982.

But we saw early attempts to bridge the gap through software. Magic Desk was one of the early tools that employed a desktop metaphor as literally as possible. Note the typewriter on the desk which, when clicked (with a joystick), would bring up a screen that looked like a typewriter. (It even dinged at the end of a line!) But also note the crazy perspective, lack of depth, and so forth. It doesn't look real but it looks real enough.

Magic Desk 64's desktop, from 30 years ago. Yes, clicking the door represented "exit".

This was an effort, as much as possible at the time, to make people comfortable with it. What's kind of crazy is that it's taken us decades to acknowledge that people are now comfortable with digital devices, conceptually. So we saw this through as much as possible. The technology to make this desktop look really good, essentially, got to a point where we could fully make some whiz-bang 3-D model of a desktop if we wanted to. And that power, surprisingly, bled through to brand new things like tablets and phones. Again, crazy to think that a tablet had green felt in software.

With iOS 7, Apple has said: "you get this". You're looking at a piece of glass, tapping on a piece of glass, so the damn thing might as well work like a piece of glass.

In lieu of shadows and drop shadows, frosted panes. Photos and videos. Layers, but seemingly borne from a place of reason than gee-whiz-ness. Depth through using the Z-axis. And simple text with minimal ornamentation. Because, really, when was the last time you saw a piece of glass in the real world with buttons sticking out in front of it - tall enough to cause bevels and shadows to appear?

Yeah, me either.

It's Code

So, it makes sense conceptually. It is also risky to do this because people rely, in part, on the way things appear in order to clue them in on what things can do - these are affordances.

I'm not sure what to make of buttons, which are still called buttons although they no longer have a resemblance to any button in the physical world I can think of. Buttons are colored text. That's it. No bounding box, no underline, no dancing ants! It really brings up the question of, "How will people know what they can and can not tap?"

Two more things to consider: there's a digital analogy here to the web. Initially, links were blue and underlined. Over time, underlines started to go away. Today links may be underlined, a different color, or both. The web has seemed to do fine. Not quite mystery meat navigation.

The other thing is that people using phones and tablets may not be using a computer, and may not have any of that computer knowledge (baggage) with them. Thus, those metaphors could make less  sense contextually. Might as well redefine them now, lest we pretend that these things are just mini-desktop computers.

Come Alive

Something I admire about iOS 7: the muscle memory I have, in a lot of cases, is still intact. Controls haven't moved a lot yet, and that means the whole thing still feels comfortable. It's a bridge. But this too will change over time, likely with iOS 8 and beyond. Apple put down the groundwork for new metaphors with this version, and now they'll exploit them. 

I trust that in another 30 years, as new interfaces rise to prominence, we'll look back at the early days of touch computing with wonder. What happens when we're pointing and swiping at things that do not exist? Yeah, that's going to be fun stuff to figure out!

Thanks to Alberta Soranzo for inspiring this piece. 

totally biased

For a very long time, I thought that one needed to be balanced and unbiased in all things at all times. This, interestingly enough, is in and of itself unbalanced and biased!

Consider journalists for a moment. In the not-too-distant past we looked to newspapers to bring the facts and leave opinions to the editorial pages. Today, we tend to align ourselves to newspapers and media outlets that reflect on us. We want opinions and we want points of view. We want the facts, but only when they fit our worldview, our reality.

Maybe this is because no one can be truly unbiased. We are all biased by our very being.

Culturally Bankrupt

Preface: I am writing this from a place of white male privilege.

We, as a society, have put a lot of credit in business metrics that are aligned with profitability. We talk about it, we have a stock market, we analyze and try to predict the future based on numbers.

Business Insider, by the numbers, appears to be an endeavor headed towards profitability. And yet the Pax Dickinson debacle demonstrates something greater: the company's priorities do not include fostering a positive, diverse, inclusive culture. They are not built that way, or else this would not have happened.

Similarly, TechCrunch's willingness to allow an astoundingly misogynistic exercise masquerading as a technological advancement into their conference demonstrates what their values are.

It is not enough for TechCrunch to say, well, hey, we'll try better next time. It is not enough for Business Insider to fire Pax. We now must determine if these organizations are actually learning and changing from these grave errors or if they're just placating their critics. They are, essentially, on probation.

It is not an HR nor PR exercise. Things like sexual harassment training and the Mad Libs "This doesn't represent our values!" press release tick the boxes to make things appear better. Maybe a trainer will come in and tell people for an hour on how not to be an asshole at work. Maybe there will be a company-wide email or two. These actions are truly the least these companies can do.

It's about what happens in the hallways, in the emails, in the conversations. It's about the things we can't see.

Until we have a universal and simple way to measure the internal culture and societal impact of an organization - one that coexists and maybe supersedes financial performance - we can only look to their external interactions and publicly call them out.

Now is as good a time as any for these companies to build true strategies and visions on how to become welcoming and inclusive workplaces while stewarding social responsibility. Not everyone is in a position of privilege to vocalize their concerns about these issues. That is precisely why it is on those of us who are to call out terrible behaviors and, more importantly, empower people who are not privileged.

It's sad to read of the ignorance in the tech community and it's frustrating to see big personalities demonstrate their stubbornness, causing suffering. There are people who have been fighting against it far, far longer than you or I. But we must fight against it, we must speak out against it, and we must fight together, because it is right.

Take Me With You

As we share our work – our lives – with others, we have an option. We can take people with us on that journey, or we can go it alone. 

We are always connected to everyone, even the people who are no longer with us on our journey. Some people might choose not to join us. That's fine (it might sting a little bit). They may wander off, find something more or less.

But the people who continue on with us, the people who are there... those are the people who can foster deep and true connections. Those are the people who can push us to become better. Those are the people who we may admire, respect, love, care for.

Who is with you now? Who do you want with you?

Let's go. 

The Constant

Writing is the thread that has been a part of my life, always. I've taken it for granted.

I really took a knack to writing when I was in grammar school. I wrote a book for a Scholastic Book Fair contest called What Year is This?  Of course it involved time travel. The lead character went back in time, met her own mother, and then the space-time continuum went kablooey. Happens!

Later still in grammar school, I was the creator and writer of a series of magazines over a 3 year run. These were paper magazines, ones I put together by myself initially and later with a staff. My best friend Greg was on staff, and soon I had a good third of my class on staff with me. We published something like 200 issues, nearly every week.  

I wrote for Loadstar 64  and Loadstar 128  - reviews of computer software. The young geek in me wanted to get published in COMPUTE!'s Gazette  or Ahoy!  or RUN . That never happened.

In high school and college, I wrote more things for myself. I wrote tons of poetry that, I trust, is not that great. I started journaling. 

I journaled on my website, writing nearly every day for years, from 1999 until about 2001. I co-wrote The Daily Ping with my good friend Ryan for 13 years, starting in 2000 - something every other day. I wrote interactive web fiction "exhibits" for several years. 

I continued to write on my website, just not in the same format. I blogged. I LiveJournaled for a short time. I used Vox. I kept trying to find the right way, the best way, to get my words out. You see it today in blogging, and tweeting, and, and, and....

That's irrelevant. The important thing is that I've been writing for almost all of my life, and I have been quick to assume it will always be there for me. Writing has been the skill I have used every day of my life, and it is the skill I will continue to use until I can no longer do it.

But it is a part of me. It's high time I say so. 

I'm a writer. 

That's Pie Style, Jack

I like Food Network Star . The show has gotten to me good and this season, well, the best person won. I've been a little more interested in the people behind these on-screen personas and was pretty happy to listen to a recent Alton Brown Podcast wherein Alton spoke with all three of the finalists.

But while I'd like to tell you how much I'm looking forward to Damaris's show, that's not my point today. No, I'm here to talk about Rodney Henry. Rodney's thing is pie - he owns pie shops and makes pie out of everything. 

During the Alton Brown interview, Rodney talked about pie of course but then he revealed what he's really  passionate about is rock music. The guy loves music, loves playing it. It's his thing. And he said something really profound towards the end of the episode when Alton was talking with the trio about how the show changed them. Rodney said:

The best thing about [the show experience] is being able to stay true to myself and my vision in the first place, and that is to support music through pie.

On the surface this may sound a little funny because it is. But it also stuck with me. Rodney loves music and he loves pie, and he doesn't see those as mutually exclusive. Rather he sees one love supporting the other, and helping the other become realized. He recognizes, clearly, that there is a ton of work that goes into having multiple (!) restaurants. It is a lot of work. But, notably, it brings in enough money to the point that he can play music and excel at both things.

Coffee with your pie?

I have a hypothesis on how my last job came to have such poor coffee. 

The coffee quality surprised me because it was while it was dispensed from a Flavia machine (expectations were low) the coffee was from Alterra - a great roasting company out of Milwaukee (expectations were high). I got to talking with a coworker about how Alterra could put their name on something so not good, given their in-house coffee is in fact very very good.

I saw this in a new light. Alterra likely knew that the giant conglomerate Mars would offer them a ton of cash and, in turn, distribute middling coffee with their name on it.  And at some point, maybe, Alterra said, "That's fine. We'll take that money and use it to do the thing we're really good at." They knew it'd be a risk but they dealt with it. And their new coffee shops are pretty beautiful, and they still make great coffee. They even opened up a shop in Madison.

I felt validated when Alterra's shops gained new names last month: Colectivo.  They're now separate entities. Alterra is now fully a Mars thing, and that's fine. From the outside it looks very much like Alterra got what it needed: a big bunch of cash to support what it truly loves.

Do the thing, support the thing

I see this as transcending money, although that's what I've focused on here. To me it's more interesting to see people hold multiple interests and activities together, and naturally allow one to fuel the others. There may be a time when Rodney finds that pie is no longer able to support his music. Or, it may flip! He might find the music is the big thing for him. Or maybe he'll branch out into hats. Possible.

If we pigeonhole ourselves into just one thing, just one possibility,  then we're not being true to ourselves - our lovely, diverse selves.

Now I need some pie.