Jun 5, 2009 by Andreas  |  Published in Business

Stupid questions at Geek Meet Sthlm!

Normally I’m not a fan of ranting, I have actually set up a rule for myself not to bad mouth anything here at Nofont.com. But some of the audience questions yesterday at the Geek Meet Sthlm just was too darn stupid not to respond to.
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There were a lot of good discussions at the Geek Meet, but some of the questions really upset me and, yes, this post is written in a quite upset mood so it might sound a bit harsh but I think you get the point. I also think and hope that those questions only represents a tiny minority of the people attending the event. So my apologys to those that know better, this is not about you.

Remy Sharp and Chris Mills gave an excellent, from a designers point of view, introduction to unobtrusive development and accessibility. As a designer getting more involved in technology and development the level was excellent, some stuff I knew and some stuff were new that I didn’t know of.

The technology Remy and Chris spent two hours describing was completely focused on enhancing the user experience of a website. The point of the talk was to show how and what you could do to make a site work no matter what plaform or level of css-, html- and javascript support the visitor has. It was obvious that what they talked about has to be used by us designer and developers to make the most out of our clients businesses and the sites that we produce for our clients.

The shocking thing to me was some of the questions from the audience and some of the tweets after Chris and Remys presentation:

“Have you talked to a designer about graceful degradation? How do you think we designers feel creating a lot of different versions of a website?”

“Isn’t graceful degredation just a lazy/bad (couldn’t hear the exact wording) solution … why don’t you just force the user to upgrade to a better browser?”

“… sane thoughts but not appliable in reality …”

I might have quoted some of you wrong but it’s the general attitude in the questions I’m trying to capture.

What the …? How on earth can you ask such questions after seeing and hearing Chris and Remy for two hours? And the sad thing was that some of the questions came from people working at some of the most promintent agencys in Sweden.

If you as a designer or developer doesn’t understand the value or choose not to use the available technology, you will lower the possibility for your clients to run their business online and in the end you are going down a quite risky path wasting your clients money and, worst of all, risking their business.

As a designer it’s your responsibility to dig into technology and get a brief understanding of what it does and how it works, you don’t have to know it inside out, you just have to get a brief understanding so that you can design and plan for it in your projects.

Design is not about beauty or pixel perfection, it’s about delivering content and functionality to the end user so that the get a hassle free experience when they encounter your clients business.

If you fail to do that you will, hopefully, be out of business pretty soon cos:

  1. Your clients will go somewhere else because what you deliver will be bad for their business. If a site fails to make a sale due to lack of decent degredation you have failed. No matter how great the design and error free validation the site has.
  2. Your co-workers won’t continue working with you because you’ll become an obstacle, a no-doer that hinders the development of great sites and services.

That’s my response to the questions.

Watch the talk here:
http://bambuser.com/node/218451
Slides will be available at:
http://my.opera.com/chrismills

So, now that you read “Stupid questions at Geek Meet Sthlm!”, what is your thoughts?



There is 4 responses to “Stupid questions at Geek Meet Sthlm!”

  1. Robert Nyman Says:

    June 5th, 2009 at 12:52 pm

    Hi,

    First, I’m glad to hear that you had a great time last night!

    In regards to the questions: I do understand your sentiment, and in essence, naturally people need to respect and understand this issues both for their own sake as well as their customers’ – and, in a bigger picture, for the better of the web.

    As I understood it, though, the first question wasn’t about designers’ feelings, but rather getting advice about how to sell the concept to designers that haven’t grasped/come to terms with the fact that things won’t look exactly the same across platforms, browsers and devices.

    About forcing users to upgrade: you and I understand that this is not a realistic situation, but not all people do that. And that’s exactly why I think we need to respond to such questions with explaining why it is such an important thing, why we need to explain the reality of it.

    My own personal humble take is that we have all once been there, not understanding, and then kind people calmly explained to us how it should be done, and we evolved from that. Therefore, we need to treat these questions the same way, and get them to join us in the struggle.

  2. Ida Says:

    June 5th, 2009 at 1:31 pm

    My opinion is that it’s better that people ask their stupid questions than they sit quietly giving the impression that they fully agree with the speaker.
    I mean at least then the speaker have a chance to talk back and maybe give a different explanation to things that some or perhaps many in the audience may have misinterpreted completely.
    And yes I was at the GeekMeet so I heard these questions. Just thought that you might want to look at this from another angle.

  3. Andreas Carlsson Says:

    June 5th, 2009 at 2:05 pm

    Hi Robert and Ida!

    Yes I had a great time, so thank you and Creuna for arranging and hosting the event.

    I agree with both of you that we all need to ask every stupid question in the world and also pitch in and teach other people about these issues.

    My first employer used to refer to me as “the pain in the ass guy” simply cos I asked way too many questions. Today I’m moving myself from pure design to a design/development combo … and I’m pretty sure that if Google was a person I would be slapped in the face for beeing a pain in the big Google ass.

    What upset me was that the questions was asked at this kind of event after two hours of hands on illustrations and examples of what might go wrong and how to avoid it.

    Yes people must be able to ask every question there is but we as creators and developers also have a responsibility to investigate and keep up with the changes and development in our own business.

    It’s as Robert says, for the best of ourselves, our client and for the web.

    Please, take a look at Tim Brays brilliant keynote from FOWA London 08. That’s the mentality I’m sometimes think is missing in our business, quriosity, flexibility of opinion and a lack of beeing responsible for my own development.

    We are so focused on what we “know” is the best way of doing things that we become blind to everything else.

    Thats why the questions upset me, the unability to reflect and rethink after two hours.

  4. Mårten Ekenberg Says:

    June 5th, 2009 at 4:59 pm

    Hi,
    I think you must have missed to quote me fully. What I said was “Second [talk] was quite like listening to Jacob Nielsen: sane thoughts but not appliable in reality”. I guess you’re aware of what Nielsen have tried to achieve during the last… what? 15 years. That is nothing that’s even close to reality in my field of work (something clients like to call “brand building” – and yes, one can argue that accessibility has to do with building brands, but that’s however not how the reality looks like).

    Sure, I’m all for standards and what good accessibility can bring to the experience. And it’s all good there are evangelists who defend their standpoints. I haven’t work with development since 2004 but follow the scene quite close and am very picky when choosing subcontractors, looking at how they develop. But, if the reality had looked like the way Jacob Nielsen sees it, the web of today would have looked far different. And it doesn’t. Hence “not appliable in reality”.