But before they went down that route I’d have offered some food for thought.

Some Contracts may resemble Toilet Paper

The first point to clarify is the country the contracts apply to… where they were signed… the jurisdiction of any legal resolution – where you have to appear in court if the contract comes to a dispute.There are three major legal systems and they don’t treat contracts equally – Common Law (the British System), Civil Law (the European System) and Islamic Law. Each individual country also has it’s own business context including political risk and economic profile. And specific countries offer unique challenges to doing business that should be considered.

If the contract is Bulgarian then you might have to hire lawyers and attend hearings on specified dates in Eastern European Civil Courts.

On the other hand, if this is an Australian contract then how do you force the Bulgarian web design firm to appear on a given date in the appropriate court in Sydney? And how do you force them to adhere to the Australian court’s judgement? If you were awarded AUD$20,000 damages then how would you enforce that fine in Bulgaria? Or African or Middle Eastern countries? Or the United States where you might be sued on that contract, have to fly to appear with US lawyers and fight an extended and expensive legal battle with huge monetary consequences if you lose.

Were you to have a legal contract with an Indian firm… any court would take between 10 and 20 years to hear the case due to stress on the Indian legal system. You may never see a resolution.

The bottom line is that a contract you can’t enforce or that has you at such a disadvantage is worse than toilet paper to your business. It might lead to your being sued in a foreign country under a different legal system and possibly in another language.

Client Privacy and Security Concerns in a Wire Canoe

The next consideration has to be privacy and security. Were you to send client data (ie. access to database content or client files) to another country then THAT COUNTRY determines the appropriate privacy laws and enforcement. This was true when Telstra sent all of our Australian accounts offshore to Indian call centres exposing their customer base to increased identity theft. If the Bulgarian web firm stole and misused this customer data then it could kill your business.

At the same time the entire infrastructure of the online business is exposed to an overseas business entity that, let’s be honest, you really don’t know anything about. What are their business motivations and relationships? Have they used black hat search engine optimisation techniques? Did they insert malicious code? Are your website visitors going to be installing malware under your name? These cheaper Bulgarian web designers are being provided access to your passwords, file structure, email accounts and sensitive information.

If that isn’t bad enough – what are the consequences if they betray your trust? You could go out of business. You may have no financial capacity to recoup the loss or pay for the damages out of your own pocket. Just as any 60 year old pervert can say they are a 12 year old girl in an Internet chat room… anybody can tell you they run a web design business in Bulgaria.

A Dollar Spent Elsewhere doesn’t turn the Merry-go-round

Believe me, I’ve got an MBA and understand the ideals of globalisation and free trade as much as the next guy. But the reality is that by chasing the budget option off-shore there are hundreds or a few thousand dollars no longer circulating in your local community. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds.

When you spend dollars at the local grocer to buy milk then the grocer can buy shoes for his child and the dairy farmer can buy the newspaper. In turn the shoe seller and the newspaper seller receive their portions of that dollar and can buy goods they need or want for their families. Money isn’t a one-time transaction, it continually renews itself through a community increasing the social value of it’s footprint. Not investing in local talent is shooting your community in the foot – less money attracted for business investment, less money for schools and infrastructure, less money for the merry-go-round of opportunity for your own children.

Because what looks like a good deal – getting somebody to work at $5 per hour – is at the heart of it exploitative anyway. It’s no different than a large company moving production to India to avoid labour laws or safety regulations.

I’m not saying never to outsource overseas… but do it for the right reasons and be prepared to pay the appropriate value for their work. Make that decision with an understanding of the inherent business risk that comes with the decision.

There’s a saying in business – “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Whatever decision you make about your web design services be prepared to grab your wallet.

This morning I stumbled across Harlan Ellison’s rant… or at least I stumbled across it again… about Paying the Writer for their effort. I think you can safely substitute web designer, coder, graphic designer, artist and journalist into that rant without risking offence to anybody but the people who want to get rich off your effort without paying.

Enough can’t be said about this subject because the No Spec! Campaign has been getting a little traction for years and we still have the problem. The problem is the person who is willing to undercut, to try to get a foot in the door by working cheap or for free… the person who impales themselves on the commercial juggernaut of business with the gusto of a World War One cry of “Over the top, lads!”…

Don’t be fooled. Those guys in the suits, those guys with the swish cars and lattes and sitting in nice office chairs with receptionists – THEY ARE GETTING PAID. And Harlan’s right… they’re not only getting paid, they’re bitching about how much they’re getting paid and they want more.

Oh it’s hard sometimes to take a dollar away from a not for profit agency or a small business. I’m as guilty in the past as anybody for lowering the hourly rate or pitching below cost because I felt a pang of guilt somewhere deep inside my Myer Winter Sale shirt… because I felt what I contributed wasn’t worth it. I felt like a bit of a fake.

So I’d like each of you to start this week with the realisation that you are worth it… don’t be intimidated about asking for money. That’s the reality of being in business. And more than just being an artist, designer, coder or writer YOU have an obligation to YOURSELF and SOCIETY to earn your keep. It’s as simple as that.

Does that small business demand their customers pay them for products and services? Yes.

This morning you should get up out of your office chair and with some small consideration I want you to write a few numbers onto your whiteboard. The first number is the amount you need each week to survive comfortably (factoring in your insurance, power, software and hardware replacement and general social needs). The second number is the hourly rate that you will demand for your undivided effort.

Promise yourself this. For at least the next month (and preferably forever) you will demand that hourly rate and concentrate on achieving that weekly target. Why? Because you are worth it. Because any industry is fucked if people will work for nothing… would the construction or trucking industry take that zero pay bullshit – FUCK NO.

The trucking industry would hunt down a free or below cost worker and break their legs in several places. Understandably.

So respect yourself and respect others on the commercial highway of life. Don’t be anybody’s donkey.

Text Books – Management

• Fundamentals of Management (Pacific Rim Edition) by Danny Samson and Richard L. Daft
• International Business: Managing in the Asia-Pacific (3rd Edition) by Greg Fisher et. al.
• Strategic Management: Competitiveness & Globalisation (Asia Pacific Third Edition) by Hanson et. al.
• Cold Steel: Lakshmi Mittal and the Multi-Billion-Dollar Battle for a Global Empire by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey
• Managers and the Law: A Guide for Business Decision Makers by Lynden Griggs, Eugene Clark and Ian Iredale
• Essential Foundations of Economics (4th Edition) by Robin Bade and Michael Parkin
• Accounting 4: An Introduction by Atrill et. al.
• Principles of Managerial Finance by Gitman, Juchau and Flanagan
• Organisational Behaviour on the Pacific Rim (2nd Edition) by Steven McShane and Tony Travaglione
• Organisational Behaviour (5th Edition) by Robbins et. al.
• Marketing Principles & Best Practices 3e (International Student Edition) by Hoffman et. al.
• Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice by Dave Chaffey et. al.
• Human Resource Management: Strategies and Processes (5th Edition) by Alan Nankervis, Robert Compton and Marian Baird
• Writing for Journalists (2nd Edition) by Wynford Hicks et. al.
• Editing Made Easy by Bruce Kaplan

Text Books – Computing

• Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving by George F. Fluger
• Operating System Concepts (7th Edition) by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
• Your UNIX: The Ultimate Guide (2nd Edition) by Sumitabha Das
• Data Communications and Networking (4th Edition) by Behrouz A. Forouzan
• PHP and MySQL Web Development (2nd Edition) by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson
• Java Software Solutions: Foundations of Program Design (3rd Edition) by Lewis & Loftus
• Data Abstraction and Problem Solving with JAVA: Walls and Mirrors (International Edition) by Frank M. Carrano and Janet J. Prichard
• Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C (2nd Edition) by Mark Allen Weiss
• Object-Oriented Software Engineering: Using UML, Patterns and Java (2nd Edition) by Bernd Bruegge and Allen H. Dutoit
• The C Programming Language (2nd Edition) by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie
• Computer Confluence: Exploring Tomorrow’s Technology (IT Edition) by George Beekman and Eugene J. Rathswohl

Text Books – Not Mine (But Read)

• Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm (International Edition) by Kenneth C. Laudon and Jane P. Laudon
• Electronic Commerce: A Managerial Perspective 2006 by Efraim Turban et. al.

Non-Fiction Purchases (Web Development)

• Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman
• The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag
• Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke
• Bulletproof Ajax by Jeremy Keith
• DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model by Jeremy Keith
• DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript and DOM by Stuart Langridge
• The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks by Davey Shafik et. al.
• Core MySQL: The Serious Developer’s Guide by Leon Atkinson

Non-Fiction Purchases (Other)

• Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design by Bill Buxton
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations by Clay Shirky
• Monkeyluv: And Other Stories on our Lives as Animals by Robert M. Sapolsky
• Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce
• What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew J. Bacevich
• The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen
• No Standing Only Dancing: Photographs by Rennie Ellis, National Gallery of Victoria
• Impossible Nature: The Art of Jon McCormack by Jon McCormack et. al.
• The Fabulist: The Incredible Story of Louis De Rougemont by Rod Howard

Electronic

• Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt
• The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle
• Remix by Lawrence Lessig
• The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig
• Code: version 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig
• Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski
• Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behaviour by Indi Young
• Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz
• The Art and Science of CSS by Cameron Adams et. al.
• The Principles of Successful Freelancing by Miles Burke
• How to Make a Book by the Blurberati
• Street Photography for the Purist by Chris Weeks
• The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks and Techniques by Corrie Haffly
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
• The Dip by Seth Godin
• 99 Cows by Seth Godin
• Bootstrapper’s Bible by Seth Godin
• Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin

Fiction

• The Collectors by David Baldacci
• Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris
• A Most Wanted Man by John LeCarre
• All the Colours of Darkness by Peter Robinson
• Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy
• The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
• Velocity by Dean Koontz
• The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz

Nothing pisses me off more about the world at the moment than our incessent greedy pursuit of cheaper products and services. We need the cheapest pair of glasses, the cheapest coffee and the cheapest quote to fill a contract. Its actually got a name – the race to the bottom. OK so what happens if everything always gets cheaper? Labour, for example… if your coffee gets cheaper and cheaper to produce, where do you think those rationalisations are coming from? Most likely its from ripping off that coffee farmer for a few cents more every time with the employer / wholesaler / importer / exporter pocketing a larger profit. Workers get exploited… middlemen get fatter… we get cheaper products on our supermarket shelves.

So who and what is Cloud Labour? Basically its anybody with online access that can do a job. Hey that sounds great, until organisations start to pay a pittance to some third world worker with online access because that’s the cheapest option. Are these workers receiving a fair living wage from their work? Do you even know? Or is Cloud Labour a way around having to even care how you treat your workforce in pursuit of profits?

The high end example in the Mullins article is a company called Innocentive. The premise is that businesses can save their large marketing and ideation costs by posting a challenge to the Cloud Labour force vying to win a fraction of the worth of the work. I judge the worth to be the amount they would have paid non-Cloud Labour and the amount they stand to make from the successful output of the challenge. Innocentive is just a Spec Cloud Labour Force – one person gets a fraction of the value of the work and the others get squat… zip… zero. If you don’t see anything wrong with that paradigm go read about the No Spec Campaign.

We need to promote Cloud Labour with the same professional and ethical constraints that we approach any labour strategy. If its just about exploitation of overseas workers in cheaper economies who can live on a dollar a day then don’t think you’re any different than someone who has tshirts or belt buckles made by 10 year olds in east asia. Because the argument is about profits… not improving their lives.

I’d just like you to think about that for a minute. Does Cloud Labour have the potential to become the new non-unionised totally exploitable owe-them-nothing workforce? Yes sure it does. But it takes you and me and everybody else to permit that exploitation.

The first take-away from Christian Heilmann’s article on Smashing Magazine titled Web Security: Are You Part of the Problem? is that you need to make sure at least one member of your team is up to speed. Everybody else needs to appreciate the importance of what that person tells them.

The second take-away is that no matter how much the world looks like a rosy cake of graphic design skills in our industry, it isn’t. Its in the marrying of good interface design, graphic design, business acumen and coding skills that make a good website. Unfortunately we’re in a world that tends to judge almost entirely on the superficial 6 seconds after the user arrives on a website – how does it look trumps is it secure? In other words, there is always pressure to make things look good but nobody pressures about writing better code until after you’re butt-shovelled by a Russian spamster or three.

And the third take-away from Christian in this article is to trust nothing – all data needs sanitising before you use it – and that URIs should be treated with similar mistrust. This is where the crappy web person is vastly different from the great web person if you’re out there hiring, employing or getting hold of a freelancer… the crappy person being the one who comes out with phrases like but it works, doesn’t it? How often have you heard that smidgen of cop-out?

Seriously, when it comes to your business and the web professional then you need to know up front before everybody’s credit card information is compromised that the web solution more than works, it works effectively. Securely.

What brought me to read Sketching User Experiences: getting the design right and the right design by Bill Buxton was an IXDA Keynote Bill Buxton did several years ago. The audio is still available but unfortunately the video has long since failed to work. Nevertheless it was solely on that conversation with interaction designers that drew me to this book.

If any of you have heard Bill speak you will quickly notice that the presentations complement his writing and vice-versa. The passion Bill has for fostering innovation in the business context drums through from start to finish with some invaluable ideas along the way. It challenges the reader to rethink a few essential components of your own methodologies and you will no doubt recognise many of the frustrations and issues incumbent in the teams you’ve already worked alongside. Because its through fostering innovation and daring to fail that great products are made. Too often we fall into the box of comfortability, we start to code on the first day alongside design… not a great outcome.

Also fundamental to the concepts in this book is the term sketching – not meaning pencil sketching so much as ideation sketching. Cheap, fast, to the point design experimentation. You’ll need to get your head around the difference between sketching in this context and fast prototyping along with the literacy to distinguish when each is useful or redundant. And ultimately you have to shift your perception of what we do – for example as software developers and web designers – from product creators to experience designers. Because the whole ballgame starts to change when we rethink our definition…

Another key takeaway from this book is that Design (with a big D) is about exploring multiple paths throughout ideation – not to be confused with prototyping and developing around a core single branch. We most often get caught up in the latter. Design is about finding solutions to problems rather than trying to fit something to a pre-determined path… simply get pen and paper, get fast and cheap materials to test ideas and do so way before you ever write a single line of code. Things are cheaper to fix and will wind up as better products if you think through the questions and obstacles before committing to the implementation. But that should be obvious…

The next time you’re challenged with a web solution and are tempted to start coding templates I dare you to ask yourself this question – what experience do you want a user of that website to take away? I don’t mean how should it look aesthetically, nor what type of shopping cart should be utilised or the flavour of JavaScript interaction. Simply, if you don’t understand the experience you’re designing then you probably aren’t designing. In fact, I have to say there has been very little actual experience design in my presence in any of the teams that I’ve worked beside.

So I like Bill Buxton’s worldview of design and it runs alongside many of the thoughts I’ve taken away from projects. I think that’s the appeal of his work in Sketching User Experiences – I think we all know there are flaws in how we’ve been operating. The bigger the business it seems the bigger the stagnation and fear of risking failure.

Were I to be running a business at present, whether or not it was a software enterprise, this book would be available for all staff to read. Because its about a way of doing business as much as a way of making software. For those in the business of designing anything – its about the experience… you don’t design mountain bikes do you? No, you design that feeling that a biker gets hitting the bottom of a big hill and rushing through the shallow stream with water spraying everywhere. This is how we should be looking at everything… from the experience outward.

Two small criticism that I would put forward are (a) the small font size: at times and in some circumstances this was a little difficult to read; and, (b) four or five images were missing so that a caption appeared on an empty page. However, the book itself is a catalyst for new ways of thinking about what we’re out to achieve. Or are they the old ways?

I hope you all read Sketching User Experiences: getting the design right and the right design before the year’s out and we see some awesome creativity as a result.

Update: 9 January, 2009
You might find Bill Buxton’s 25 minute day one keynote Sketching User Experiences for MIX09 worth watching.

An abstraction is what you get when you operate your motor car. You don’t have to know anything about internal combustion, the aerodynamic effects on your braking system or the little mice that run around under your car’s purring bonnet. Your steering wheel, clutch, brake and air conditioning work through a limited set of abstracted functions – easy to learn and easy to operate.

Now conceptually redesign that same car with the obfuscation principle. This principle is most often highlighted by coders who might work extremely hard to hide the true purpose of their code, if only to make themselves indispensable. Obfuscation in the design of a car would be to do something like offer the appearance that no door exists to enter (where the door exists on the roof). This would also be referred to as a lack of affordance. Obfuscation in design is the purposeful concealment of the communication message and the creation of ambiguity.

Whenever we design new things or redesign old things these two factors pull at our coat tails. Abstraction to aid usability and obfuscation to create ambiguity. Sometimes you want something hidden by ambiguity – for the users’ own good – but use that power wisely. As for coders – abstraction always, obfuscation never. Indispensable and asshole can mean the same thing… occasionally.

The Sound of Young America: Merlin Mann

We probably all suffer from the inner awareness that we suck, that we’re really imposters and will be discovered oneday and die a lonely death with crap in our pants (pretty much Merlin’s words, not mine). The biggest lesson to learn about life – be OK with the idea that you suck sometimes, and just get started.

If you’ve never heard Merlin Mann’s presentations then you’re in for a treat because his irreverence for the subject matter (aka comedic qualities), and compounded experience in the getting started department, make him almost uniquely engaging as a presenter. How do you get started? Why it may be as simple as accepting that your fingers need to start before your brain will kick in, or that you need to accept you’re never going to know everything before you start something. At some point you’re just going to have to turn off that email client and start writing. There you might just be started.

Whatever you do for a living, I’d recommend you listen to Merlin’s presentation.

Nate Koechley’s video explaining Professional Frontend Engineering (about 90 minutes) goes a long way to filling in those gaps. I’d also recommend listening to Bill Buxton speak about Design with a big D and the Design Ecosystem. The very nature of what we’re employed to do on projects is to minimalise most of those things you would have otherwise stumbled over.

The website you sit down and use is the tip of a very large iceberg, in fact. The better the team below that berg the better your user experience, the faster the rendering, the better the adaptability to other browser environments and platforms. If you don’t have to think then it’s probably because frontend engineers (whatever the job tag) considered the technicalities and implemented the solution. And when we’re really good you won’t notice our footprint at all.

Veerle’s post in defence of 24ways.org’s design innovation definately comes from the graphic designer as is clear from her comment reply regarding usability. I’d put forward tentatively that just because something is accessible doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful, and the same should apply to usability. When we step beyond the user’s importance to weigh in with our trump card of design as art – that’s a particular kind of design arrogance. But that’s another discussion entirely, so back to 24ways.org.

The problem is that in the great web tradition of trolling and flaming the comments about the redesign are often acutely negative. Part of the relationship between a popular site and high traffic will mathematically transpose to a higher number of negative comments, right? Well, sort of. The problem is that rather than critique, which very few of us are professionally trained to provide, we give opinion. As time short as we are that opinion can be reduced to a series of caveman grunts – don’t like, is shit, pull in your head. Personally, I’d consider just pulling those out in moderation simply because they don’t add to the conversation – water off a ducks back. But Veerle has a valid point, we ask for innovation but bowl anyone over in an instant who dares move outside the conformist circle (remind me tomorrow to do my graphic design post, by the way – I have similar issues with a lot of graphic design).

Personally I find the current design of 24ways.org difficult to use because it’s hard to read. There seems to be some disconcerting level of grey overlay that is purposefully trying to make my life more difficult. Usability, from my user perspective, is more important than beauty. After all, it’s an information site.

So let’s cut to the chase. What makes a successful website? Accessibility? Usability? Beauty? Functionality? Is it the slickness of the commenting system? Rather than criticism of the design I’d be interested in the statistical results and how those results meet the business case. Because web sites aren’t artistic silos, they’re business solutions to business problems. Does it make money? Does it meet it’s goals?

The criteria for 24ways.org would be reasonably simple. Has traffic increased or decreased this year? Are users staying to read the articles or bailing out? Next, ask yourself what is the purpose of 24ways.org – disemmination of contemporary best practice information? Is it about raising the profile of the website itself?

I’d suspect I’m far from the only person who finds the interface difficult to negotiate. But I’d have to concede that from a business perspective as long as the statistics are supporting this year’s design and the information is being effectively spread throughout the designer / developer community then it’s meeting those underlying goals. And, oddly enough, the controversy around the design itself can be (although a risky strategy) enough to raise the profile of 24ways.org to reach more of our industry radars. It’s better to be talked about than not mentioned at all. Right? So without knowing the brief it’s a bit hard to see if Tim’s met it – or pushed convention too far.

It’s always a little dangerous when the user is placed behind the importance of the graphic design. If that weren’t the case we’d be praising small grey on grey text along with mystery meat navigation, we’d have animated gifs and blinking text – try to read that man! Cool. But I think 24ways.org is a little more sophisticated than that.

The short answer to Veerle’s post would be that I agree, trolling and flaming are an industry bore. But it’s the web in a nutshell. Anonymity breeds a prolific audio-vomit we don’t meet in regular life. Delete those comments that don’t contribute critique, and move on. However, the design consciously impacts my ability and desire to read the articles. The page has been open on a Firefox tab for a week and I haven’t completely read a single one. That might not be so good a sign that it’s a great redesign.

At the end of the day market forces will determine the business answers to 24ways.org. They’ll survive for another year, the content ensures it. But for a lot of people expecting best practices it might eat at the street cred. That’s the innovator’s risk.