At that point, he’d mostly been known as a songwriter. A very good songwriter, he’d written several songs that are now established in the country music canon: “Hello Walls,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and perhaps most famously, “Crazy,” which became Patsy Cline’s signature song.

After several years as a famous-among-dozens songwriter, he’d tried his hand at singing his own songs. The results were very mixed. He’d managed to float some songs into the top 25, but unlike Conway Twitty or Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton, he just couldn’t break out. By 1972, RCA was ready to drop him, and he was ready to saddle up and leave Nashville.

And so he did. He moved to Austin, and we never heard from him again. The end.

Now, we know that wasn’t the end of his career. But look around the tech industry right now — how many people do you know that are still churning away at 40, 50, 60? There are a few, but it’s an industry that likes to ride twentysomethings hard and put them away wet. It likes to lionize young CEOs, even if their immaturity ultimately becomes a boat anchor on the company’s potential. If you haven’t joined management by the time you’re 40, if you haven’t made a substantial impact by the time you’re 40, you may as well saddle up and leave Nashville.

Willie Nelson arrived in Austin in 1972, at a time when the Austin music scene we’ve come to know was just starting to flower. It was mostly centered around a dancehall on the south side of the river called Armadillo World Headquarters. There the music was incredibly eclectic — “hippie” music one night, R&B the next night, then maybe some country mixed in. And into this ferment came a retired country songwriter who embraced the eclecticism and began to transform his musical style. What he produced came to be known as outlaw country.

Three years later, in 1975, “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain” reached #1 on the country charts and broke into the top 30 on the pop charts. Instead of the slick, violin and pedal steel laden countrypolitan sound of Nashville, it was two guitars, a bass, an accordion, and Willie Nelson.

And with that, Willie Nelson had flipped the script. He’d go on to have another 24 more #1 hits over the next 30 years and become a country music demigod, a Hollywood actor, a global celebrity, and yeah, perhaps the most famous pothead in America.

So maybe that’s the lesson for all of us staring down 40. Don’t stop learning. Don’t stop listening. And don’t stop changing. There’s an entire generation of web professionals that are moving into and through their 40s now, some of whom like Ol’ Willie feeling like it’s time to go to pasture. But soon enough they will find their Armadillo World Headquarters, grow their hair, and turn the web world upside down thanks to their willingness to adapt their experience to the new world.

I hope I’m one of them.

Sigh.

Look, the problem is simple: Standards just aren’t moving fast enough for the web, so we — the web design community as a whole — have chosen to be pragmatic in the face of a constantly changing web environment. The W3C wasn’t advancing HTML and the DOM fast enough, so we accepted JavaScript UI libraries to fill in the gaps, and then we accepted (begrudgingly for some) Ian Hickson’s WHATWG and the prickly embrace of HTML5. The slow-to-stall speed of CSS standards opened the door to LESS and SASS, which the community is mostly accepting despite misgivings.

And in the middle of all that, the vendor prefixes came along because we wanted to let browser makers beta new ideas without polluting the standards stream. And there were many complaints, but one surprising ally.

So we embraced all these things — a way to work around the slow progress of standards — because wanted our sites to be cool. We wanted them to have motion, animation, gradients, and all the awesome things we used to have to use Flash to pull off. And with a captive audience in iOS, we could use responsive design to really make them think They were Living In The Future.

But now we face the cost of all this need for speed: An ecosystem that so requires -webkit other browser makers want to support them too to keep themselves from falling behind. And as the web world rages against Mozilla’s “treachery,” the W3C just went to last call on Backgrounds And Borders — five years after the great CSS3 branching in an attempt to get the standards done faster. In the time it’s taken Apple to launch the iPhone and become the single largest mobile and tablet company in the world, the W3C has moved exactly two parts of the roughly 20 part CSS Level 3 spec from draft to standard. Backgrounds and Borders, should it make it to recommendation in the next year, will make three. And during that period between Last Call and Rec, Apple will launch the iPad 3 and change the game yet again.

Now, it may seem I’m digging on the W3C, but let’s be clear: I LIKE the W3C. They are moving at a meaningful and purposeful speed. They’re hamstrung by trying to keep their component organizations from strangling one another, and they’re eternally caught between the pressure of Congress and Cloakroom* dealings, but they do move with purpose and are willing to think the issues through. Given the choice between the W3C’s mandarin republic and WHATWG’s dissent-as-thoughtcrime oligarchy, I would choose the W3C 11 times out of 10.

So what really is the problem here? I’ve concluded it’s our collective hypocrisy — those of us who’ve been willing to call ourselves Standardista (or some less pretentious title). We want standards. We want reasonable, sensible guidelines from a group that we can believe in and trust. But we also want to move the web forward. We also want to watch Dan Cederholm or Eric Meyer flip out some insane CSS3 trick that makes us run back and slam it into a current project, IE7 be damned.

And we can’t have both. Standards — meet and right standards — take time. The ongoing HTML5 debacle (which most everyone denies is a debacle, but the monthly public WHATWG-member-vs-the-world blowups suggest otherwise) is proof of what happens when you try to rush to codify half-baked ideas that are deficient in real-world use cases.

Standards ship on a software release schedule — they must be designed, created, tested, re-tested, re-created, designed, re-tested, objected to, and re-designed, re-tested, and re-objected to before they ever get the “recommendation” stamp. The web, though, isn’t software. If anything, the web is a prime example of Release Early, Release Often. Websites ship with bugs, and the bugs will get fixed by priority, tomorrow, when the designer has had some sleep. In software, though, it’s either hotfix or wait a year.

So maybe in that sense WHATWG has it right — they’re releasing early and often and assuming we will eventually settle on the rules (though whether they’ll admit they ever admit they make mistakes is another conversation). But how do we do that when we also know standards need time to bake? How do we give browser makers the ability to experiment without fear of mucking up the process?

Browser prefixes.

It’s either that or extending Amaya to what it should have been all along — a canonical browser from which all other browsers should branch, built with the collected donated might of the vendors who make up the core of the W3C. Or perhaps it’s the W3C doing the same thing with WebKit. But neither of those proposals would fly. Microsoft isn’t going to let some of its best people on the IE team work directly with members of the Chrome team, and Google’s not going to do the same. They’re all in a high stakes poker game for the future of the web, and none of them want to show their cards.

Standards should be about constant iteration towards a universal. This is the web we’re talking about here, an environment that’s just reached drinking age (in the US) and that has gone from a NeXT screen to tablets and from static hypertext to animations, video, and scripted code during those 21 years. I don’t think in human history we’ve ever seen a technology grow, change, and pivot so much inside of a single generation. And yet, our standards move slowly because that’s what standards are supposed to do — move and evolve slowly.

And we should let them continue to move slowly, all while innovation continues in the sandbox of browser-specific code.

In the meantime, we look to LESS and SASS to do what Prototype and jQuery has done — be the bridge between the web we know now and the web we know should be. We pressure the W3C (and their constituent vendors) to continue the path of standardizing innovation (and perhaps join the W3C ourselves).

And we live in the hope that we don’t face with WebKit what we faced with IE in the early half of the 2000s: A de facto standard from lack of substantive competition.

It took Firefox and Safari to shake us from that near-monopoly. But what of a world where something like 90% of all the mobile devices run with a native WebKit browser?

Mobile has hastened the decline and fall of Flash. Will mobile also mean the decline and fall of web standards?

* – thanks to Colin for correcting my metaphor

“It’s wrong,” they said, and then gave a litany of possible solutions and vague impressions, none of which was truly helpful. They asked me to intervene, offer an alternative design. But I didn’t want to do anything.

I had given this assignment to the team’s UX designer at the start of the release cycle. I had full confidence he could drive the design and that he was fully capable of doing it.

So I talked to the designer. He came up with a whole bunch of ideas. But none of them alleviated the vague sense of unease I felt about the design. The one thing that did stick out to me was the deep blue background of the dialog. Could he try a light background instead?

No, he insisted. He’d done that already. It didn’t work.

Still feeling that uneasiness, I decided to do a full-on design review of the dialog. I looked at the functionality, compared it to the known use cases, wrote some vague scenarios I tested out on the screen, and asked whether there was something deficient or defective in the dialog.

After 90 minutes of poking and prodding, I realized there was nothing wrong with the dialog functionally. It executed every scenario well. The use cases were met. There were some minor design flaws, but there was no glaring functional problem.

So I played back Products’ criticisms and half-solutions in my head — and my own personal feelings about the dialog alongside them. And that’s when I realized that every single solution thrown at the dialog was a single solution. None of the suggestions overlapped.

General unease. Solutions that don’t overlap. A lot of vague criticism that didn’t point at any one thing in the dialog.

And that’s when the lightbulb finally came on: The problem was aesthetics.

With that in mind, I wrote an e-mail to the designer detailing a few things he could do to get this the right way around. At the center of the critique was getting rid of the blue background.

And he objected. The blue is right! The blue works! Dark colors fit the general design milieu!

Just try it one more time, I insisted. They’re expecting a dialog, and this doesn’t look like a dialog.

He dropped the blue, and quickly a new aesthetic emerged that the Products team were crazy happy about.

The blue background had too much value for the designer. He was too in love with the look to let go of it. And he needed to let it go.

The literary critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch spoke of the need to strip these things away:

Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.“

From this passage we get the phrase “Kill your darlings,” and it’s been a mantra of writers like Faulkner and Stephen King. But it’s not just writers that need to kill their darlings but all creatives. Designers have this problem, too. I’ve seen developers fight tooth and nail for a chunk of code that, while elegant, isn’t necessary or fails to handle requirements well.

When I was younger I never edited my e-mails and blog posts. As I’ve grown older I’ve found myself proofreading even the smallest e-mails just to make sure I’m not obscuring my response behind gaudy prose. In design, I am still learning to let go, but I’m getting better.

I now believe the mark of a great creative is being willing to kill their darlings with pity or regret, to understand that this is all part of a longer creative journey, and the only way forward is to kill your darlings.

I noticed during the design review that the work the designer was doing harkened back to a previous designer’s prototype that was rejected and shelved. The new design built and expanded on those original ideas. But the blue background was a carry-forward of the dark background on the original design. One designer’s darling begat another designer’s darling.

And in the end, the darling had to go. But once it went, not only did the final product look much better, it confirmed the original designer’s skills.

I have a box of Oblique Strategies on my desk. I’ve used them occasionally to break creative logjams. But before anything else, I look for my darlings and try removing them.

Kill your darlings. Only when you can kill them without pity or remorse can you move towards greatness. Great design is not about what you think is awesome. Great design is about your awesome obscuring everyone else’s need to get things done.

I do not know Whitney Hess. I read her post on what a user experience designer is not, which I think is the worst blog post I’ve read this year not authored by Michael Arrington (though I would note that Arrington occupies my entire top five). I found the article to be overly prescriptive in a field that was birthed from web generalists trying to fold interaction design practice into a web that was still Web-with-a-capital-W. I’ve never heard her speak, though I’ve heard good things about her.

I do know Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast. And I do know Elaine Nelson. I’ve known them for years and know their web work well. They are damn good designers and developers the world should know about, people who were building websites before Hess could drink and back when we all thought XML would save the world. (It didn’t.)

So when Andrea says to me in response to Hoekman’s scathing criticism of Hess that “people like him that make me petrified of public speaking,” and when Elaine follows with “that sort of thing makes me want to never ever write abt web,” I know Hoekman missed his mark badly.

I find some of Hoekman’s criticisms to be valid. Hess has come off as naive in her writing at times, arguing for a level of specialization that only Fortune 250 companies and dedicated UX agencies have while ignoring smaller firms as well as the public sector and their small-to-nonexistent budgets. His description of her talk in Italy suggests she didn’t understand the audience. I myself have wondered what she’s offering to the broader web world right now. I see a 29 year old with a lot of talent still locked up in promise and not expressed in action.

(As an aside, have you noticed our so-called “web heroes” are all in their mid 30s to late 40s and professionally emerged in the late 90s and early 2000s? I can’t think of anyone who’s reached “hero” status, Hoekman included, who doesn’t fit those qualifications, save Kristina Halvorson, who emerged in the last two years but is roughly my age. Do we preternaturally choose to not grant authority to any web profesisonal under the age of 30?)

So Hoekman has a good argument. Why did he choose to wrap it in so much venom?

Hoekman’s post reminded me of two other people in the “web hero” category — Joe Clark and Mark Pilgrim — that have dished out unapologetic scorn to those they do not consider worthy to tie their sandal when it comes to accessibility. I have a lot of respect for Clark and Pilgrim, but there are times when I find their prickliness and bile obfuscates whatever message they’re trying to get out.

Is it sexism? I don’t see how it could be. Hoekman’s “sin” of sexism is that he’s jumping up and down in a known minefield. He should have known better, but it wasn’t on purpose.

But there is a chauvinism to his argument. Hoekman is framing himself as speaking truth to power in an industry that refuses to tell the truth. This belief truly becomes tortured when he starts dragging Zeldman and Happy Cog into it, as if they are Wearing No Clothes. The problem is that I’ve found people in the trenches of the web world have a very sober view of Zeldman and Happy Cog, even if they’re not always running around spewing 3000 word diatribes about them on the Internet.

I mean, seriously, we all worship the feet of a twice-divorced recovering alcoholic with a petulant streak and his design firm that spit out a re-do of WordPress which took multiple iterations to return to usability? THAT Zeldman? THAT Happy Cog?

Seriously. I respect Jeffrey Zeldman. I was lucky enough to have lunch with him last year at An Event Apart. He’s contributed to building web design from a bunch of people with text editors to an immense, diverse industry. Hell, I have one of his quotes hanging from the corkboard opposite my cube. But he’s no hero of mine. He’s just another imperfect guy with something to say.

Just like me.

But what can I say in a world where Hoekman is waiting to gun me down the moment I give a talk he doesn’t agree with, or suggest a different way in user experience from “what he built?” I’ve been a web professional now for a dozen years, though it’s only only been this year I’ve turned from web generalist to user experience designer when I left the higher education web world. Do I have enough experience that I’m not going to be slapped with a “dime-a-dozen designer” label by him? Is he going to say that because I’m speaking I’m not building anymore and thus am no longer valid, like some on Twitter insinuated?

And yet, I do speak. I speak because I enjoy it. I speak because it lets me teach and be taught. I’ve been given the opportunity to speak at an Ignite, a Refresh, and SXSW. I count myself incredibly lucky that the same conference attendees that vilified a keynote speaker handed me a Best Of Conference award the following year.

And yet, I worry that Hoekman — or someone like him — is waiting in the wings to fire at will and accuse me of not being good enough for his impossible standard.

And if I, someone who has no fear of an audience, feel that way, what of Andrea and Elaine, people with as much (if not more) experience than me (and better at this than me)? Why should they dare step up and speak? Why should they share, knowing the spectre of Hoekman looms somewhere out there?

Why should anyone timid or afraid they’ll be publicly humiliated as an impostor speak in a world where Hoekman lurks?

See, that’s what makes me sad. Hoekman attacks Hess, and he loses the argument because his bile is louder than his honest criticism. Hoekman attacks Zeldman and Happy Cog, an appeal to the ground level web person that falls flat because we’ve heard it all before and we don’t need Hoekman to defend us from them when we’re adults and can do it ourselves, thanks.

But Hoekman scares the crap out of the very people who should be speaking up — the ones “building cool things” who are afraid to share what they have. The young designer who found something interesting in a Camtasia recording that led them to build a better web form. The experienced developer with much to share but a deep-seated impostor syndrome. The user experience specialist who doesn’t think they have enough experience to open their mouths in public. In other words, the very people Hoekman says he’s saving from the infant terrible Hess are the very people he’s scaring off.

“Millions of designers do and say the same things every single day, and the web is better because of it” comes across not as a statement of affinity with those of us who fight in the trenches every day but as a backhanded slap to those who stay in line and don’t stray from the path.

Because I think that’s what Hoekman is arguing for — do things his way and no one gets hurt.

He would argue differently. He would lean on the idea, I think, that those who do good work should be and will be rewarded for it. But I’m reminded of a saying of my father’s that I used over the weekend at Barcamp Seattle — “The cream rises to the top, but s–t floats too.” Trying to get signal through the noise is already difficult. We need to amplify the best so we can turn down the douchebags. How does a vicious teardown of a younger speaker help when some of us are just trying to be heard — and are trying to coax out some outstanding people out of their shells?

I don’t know Robert Hoekman Jr. But I know his vitriol, and it’s hard to separate his good ideas from his bad behavior. And while I respect his ideas about user experience, he is not my hero, for sharp criticism must come with honesty and respect, not with venom and dismissiveness.

I don’t know Whitney Hess. I know some of her writings, and I believe she lacks an understanding of how flexible the idea of user experience must be. She is not my hero, though I respect her ideas, and I believe that she is an decent person who knows she is learning, just like all of us. And I would rather live in her UX reality, flawed as I may see it, than in Hoekman’s, because hardened ideas are easier to deal with than hardened hearts.

I know Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast and Elaine Nelson. I know their writings. I know their work. I know them personally. They do great work. They are fallible. And they are my heroes, because every day, despite small budgets, great stress, and looming personal burnout, they do great things. And should they ever stand and speak, I will listen. And should I disagree, I will tell them in private long before I criticize them in public. And if I were to criticize, I would hope I’d choose to be clear and concise and dispassionate.

And should Robert Hoekman Jr choose to suggest they’re “dime-a-dozen designers” who are “hurting” an industry, I do not think I could be clear and concise and dispassionate.

The future of usability lies in the hands of a thousand professionals taking Hoekman and Hess’ ideas and making something new. I hope some of them will share their ideas — and their work — with the class. And I hope they can share without fear of Robert Hoekman Jr suggesting they are a dime a dozen, or Chris Fahey having so little respect for the industry that he’d suggest the work that’s come before has been poor. I just hope they can share.

And I hope one day I might be lucky enough to grace the stage of a conference like An Event Apart, though I think my comment about Jeffrey Zeldman has me blackballed for life.

(And one last aside to Mr. Hoekman: Leaning on “the lurkers support me in email?” Seriously?)

What’s remarkable about it is how she closed the letter:

…we live in a computer-centric world, and for those people looking for information about our school on the Internet, we must provide a website that easily and clearly directs prospective students or visitors to information they are looking for…. Good recruitment practices, which include good customer service, attract more students…. To put it bluntly, if we don’t have students, we don’t have anything. If we want to attract intelligent, qualified students it is our responsibility to practice good customer service by presenting what our school has to offer in a clear, easily accessible and user-friendly way.

Ten years ago Janette understood the mission of the higher ed web. My last ten years have been about convincing everyone else of this.

Universities exist because of those they provide service to — teaching, research, practice. They must never, ever forget that relationship.

At some point Lori Packer* wandered by. Lori was the track chair and had selected my proposal which had become this talk which had become a red stapler and a Best Of Conference trophy. We got to talking about what it all meant. Somewhere in there, I said that I’d been unhappy at work for quite a while, that I was starting to ask whether I should stay in higher ed. Lori retorted that there were many good things about being in higher ed.

I responded, “I love higher ed. And I love the web. But I don’t like my job.”

And, at that moment, I realized what I’d just said was Truth. Not “true,” because it was, but Truth, as in a revelation of honesty.

The University of Washington has been good to me the last 9 1/2 years. And yet, I’ve been unhappy. I couldn’t move up. I was top of the food chain in my unit, and because my unit valued the web, I was paid well compared to other web people on campus. And yet, I’m top of the food chain. There’s no rung on the ladder above the one I’m on.

When I did interview for other web positions on campus, I was either passed over for cheaper alternatives, or I was given offers at a massive pay cut (and still a full-time job). And all these moves would have been lateral. We have an excellent person running the web for the university right now, but she’s probably going to die in the saddle, so moving into that role is out of the question.

As well, I have a problem with political capital. I have a lot of it. Heaps of it. But it’s like the sickles and galleons of Harry Potter — meaningful in the wizarding world but utterly worthless in this world. I can’t spend the capital; I lack the power to transform it into the changes I’ve desired.

At one point last year I told my boss that for all the good things everyone thinks I’ve done, I feel like I’ve dragged the school 50 feet in 9 years, and everyone else is 500 or 5000 feet further along. I’ve been long promised that change would come, this will be the year that Everything Will Change, but the change never comes, thanks to the resistance to change that is endemic to this entire university.

It is time to go. I’m leaving higher ed.

Starting January 31, I will be moving to a technology business management startup called Apptio. They need someone who can help their brilliant Java programmers make their web applications look and feel brilliant. And I will get my first raise of any sort in 5 years.

I would love to stay in higher ed, but I’m doubly a victim of geography — I love Seattle, and Seattle is very, very lacking in institutions of higher education. If I were in the Northeast, I could just latch on to another college down the street, but in Seattle you don’t have a lot of choices. As for uprooting and going somewhere else, I just bought a house in 2010, and I’ve got a daughter in school she loves and a wife who finally has a job she doesn’t hate. On the other side, the metro Seattle high tech community right now is stronger than it’s ever been. Between this and the draconian cuts coming to UW, this is a great time to leave.

But I won’t be completely free of the higher ed community and UW just yet. I’m still teaching web development in the spring, and I’m still planning on defending my Best Of Conference title at HighEdWeb 2011. I’m not going to be scarce with the higher ed web community; I’m in a new role, but I’ll always be a fellow traveler.

I stood on stage in October talking about why why higher ed is the best gig in the Web. And I still believe that it’s true, and I’m sorry I can’t continue in higher ed. There are some great people doing incredible work at schools and colleges all over the country. And they’re doing it despite many things — money, time, an organization that values them at the level they should. Higher ed web people achieve more with duct tape and bailing wire than for-profit web people achieve with actual funding.

But in that litany of mine that’s been echoed around the web since I said it that Tuesday morning in Cincinnati, I left out one thing. Love higher ed. Love the web. Love people. And love yourself, too. Do work that makes you happy and pays you what you’re worth (not necessarily with money). If you feel that way in a higher ed job, then you’re awesome, and I really hope you’re making the world a better place every day. But if you’re miserable in your job right now, then find something else. You deserve better than long hours, low pay, and zero respect. If they don’t love you, find someone who will.

I realized that in a small way my job was like an abusive relationship — I should get out, but this life was all I’ve known. The Truth was that I did deserve better, and my loyalties should lie with my God, my family, and myself, not with a job.

And given I spent a quarter of my life at UW and a third of my life in higher ed when you count my years at Colorado, I doubt I’ll ever be free of it. No one ever really leaves the University of Washington; they just take sabbaticals at for-profit companies.

—

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and Facebook.

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* – Do not hold Lori responsible for any of this. She just happened to be there at the right time. If she comes out for the M’s-Phils series this summer, I’ll buy the game tickets.

XKCD #773: University Website

By this morning, it was all over Twitter and spawning all sorts of it’s-true-no-it’s-not commentary from the higher ed world. Most of the negative commentary seems to be around the importance of the university website as promotional piece. Meanwhile, the user-centered design folks are mostly pointing and screaming “THIS.”

As for me, I agree with both sentiments — the home page is about promotion, but it’s also about focusing on your users and their needs. But, in addition, I am reminded of something I’ve been saying around here for years:

The web is a tool, not a toy.

One of the sentiments I hear from higher-ups on university campuses is that they see the web as this “thing” they must “have” like the latest electronic gizmo. It’s a sentiment I heard in the late 1990s quite a bit from people — that having a website made you Cooler Than Everyone Else.

The frightening thing, of course, is that people are still saying that in 2010. It doesn’t make you cooler than anyone else to have one; it’s de rigueur now, so NOT having one makes you LESS Cooler Than Everyone Else.

Around 2002 or so, I noticed a change in what they were saying. They talked now about putting information on the web, filling their sites with a mishmash of information. I dubbed this the “web as bulletin board” approach. This was an improvement over the “web as toy” attitude, but there was no strategy involved, and often you ended up with university home pages that were slumgullions of random chunks of information that had no purpose other than to, well, make you look Cooler Than Everyone Else. Here’s a big box about a research grant we got! Here’s a huge thing on some random academic center whose professor demanded we put it on the front page. Oh, you want to find out about our academic programs? Click on this itty-bitty link down in the bottom right.

University websites, for the most part, have been a combination of these two things ever since then. Take the now-famous Brown University website, filled with its sliding boxes. Perhaps, from an information architecture standpoint, it’s pretty good (and I think it probably is), but what did everyone talk about? The sliding boxes. This is the Web As Toy, and I personally think it distracts more than enlightens.

Then there’s the new University of Washington home page. If you head for the bottom of the page, you run into what’s been dubbed the “Obama footer,” so called because it was the same link-heavy footer style used on the Obama campaign site. The problem, of course, is that you have a lot of useful links all clustered in these long lists that make them hard to read and unusable. (Scott Thomas, the Obama ’08 design director, explained at An Event Apart 2009 why they had the link-heavy footer — everyone wanted their stuff on the home page, so they just stuffed them all in the footer out of the way of the news and marketing messages so they wouldn’t interfere. Win-win, yes, but it doesn’t seem like a viable long term strategy, and in fact the big footer was not a design element of any Obama-derived website that followed.)

I don’t think the web is a Toy, and I don’t think it’s a Bulletin Board. I think it’s a tool. It’s a device for getting needed information to the users looking for it.

An example: Someone at our undergraduate advising office told me a story a couple of years ago. For a long time, the advisers were constantly going through burnout due to the endless crush of students begging them for help. They decided to do something radical: They rounded up all the frequently asked questions of students — everything from what classes to take to how to declare a major — and put a list of answers on their website. Students were then advised to check the website first to see if the information they needed was already there.

Something strange happened in the Advising Center. The students kept coming, but the questions were now harder, things that required time and effort to solve. The advisers, though, found they now had time to do the legwork to solve the hard questions and take the time to help walk students through crises, because they weren’t spending the day on the phone answering the questions the website answered. Students were happier, and the burnout started to fade as the advisers saw what their work meant to these crisis students.

To me, that’s using the web as a tool — they identified their audience, identified their questions, answered them, then made themselves more available to deal with the stuff the web didn’t or couldn’t answer. It’s not just the “user-centered design” we wave around like the new banner we must rally around, but it’s also a user-centered organization that uses the web to help make their users’ lives easier.

Now, there is one issue with this — what information needs to be in front of the audience. Audiences want to find faculty phone numbers. Audiences also want to find out about your school. Both pieces of information need to be available to them. I am not opposed to the home page as marketing tool. Used correctly, it can be a great device for promoting the institution.

But it must come with findability. The information the people are there to look for needs to be obvious. It needs to be findable.

Think of it this way — retail stores fill the fronts of stores with aspirational products as well as cheap, high margin tchotchkes. My local Target is loaded with items they’re promoting that I’m not looking for, all with the idea that perhaps I’ll think hey, this is only $1, or hey, I really do need a 5 burner gas grill with sear burner and at a low price to go with the socks and underwear I actually was here to buy.

But imagine if Target was only about all this stuff they were trying to promote. Imagine if it was such that you couldn’t actually find the socks and underwear for all the big displays of grills and the videos of people using electric toothbrushes and the aisles and aisles of cheap junk. What would happen? They’d stop selling socks and underwear and everything else people came to find because people would go to Fred Meyer or Wal-Mart where the socks and underwear were findable.

And that, to me, is the truth of the XKCD cartoon. A university website is a tool for finding answers. If along the way you find out something new about the institution you didn’t know before, that’s gravy. But if your audience is prospective students, and they just want to know if you offer their degree and how to apply, and you’re shoving videos and mission statements in their face rather than giving them a route to the application form they want to fill out, you will lose.

Noel-Levitz’ recently released E-Expectations survey found 1 in 4 prospective undergraduates took a school off their potential applicant list because of a poor experience with that school’s website. We can say all we want about how nice multimedia presentations and marketing materials help draw students in, but if you don’t give the students what they want, they will leave.

The web is a tool. It is not a toy. Content may be king, but the user is God. And they demand — and deserve — usability and findability. Let content strategy and user-centered design lead the way, not the hither and thither of provosts and presidents and professors and their pontifications.

He knows marketing. He breathes marketing. He is marketing.

And I think that’s why his post this morning about higher education is so detached from the reality of higher ed.

Mind you, I agree with his basic premise (and have said so in the past) — that higher ed in this country is on the precipice of collapse. Nine years building and running websites for my large research university employer has given me a view into the dark present and darker future of our institutions of higher learning.  Some have overemphasized research at the cost of providing solid undergraduate instruction. Others have solid teaching, but the diminishing returns of massive tuition increases means they are vulnerable to the coming revolution in online learning, which will bring the same Internet-driven changes to colleges that have come already to the music and news industries. Budget cuts in public institutions are obliterating any chance for schools to do anything but hunker down and survive. Meanwhile, private schools like Stanford (Godin’s alma mater) now charge more than $50K a year just for tuition.

The business model of higher education is completely unsustainable. I think Godin and I agree on that. And it pains me to defend higher ed, because I know where the problems are and who the problems are and that why universities are in trouble now and in the years to come.

But his case is so vapid and superficial it’s as if he’s seen the postcard and that’s all the data you ever need to judge a place. And sadly, that’s his case, in a nutshell.

Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is?

No, you can’t. But first off, you’re not buying a car. You’re buying an education. An experience. And every school has their flipbooks of ivy walls and brick buildings and oversaturated blue skies because that is exactly what we expect.

Not students, mind you. Parents. Students don’t read the flipbooks. They read the websites. And the websites of higher education are a vibrant, diverse cohort. And that’s where the real competition is, if you call it that. The schools that have chosen to dive into social media and have sought to interact with potential students that way have been rewarded. Those that haven’t, well, they have flipbooks.

Flipbooks and catalogs and brochures go to two kinds of people: Parents and prospective students who need to have something “tangible” to show them that yes, they are really going to apply for that grad program. Everyone else uses the web. And as public colleges have more and more of their funding cannibalized for, I don’t know, paying for lawsuits over pointless immigration and abortion laws (I’m looking at you, Arizona and Oklahoma), there’s less and less money for print. Most of the schools within my employer have ceased printing catalogs, telling people to go online instead.

College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up. As a result, there are millions of people in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay….

Well, yes. DUH. College costs have outstripped inflation for something like 25 years straight. But there are a lot of reasons why they’re going up. State support has collapsed. Health insurance costs have risen. Students are demanding more and more services — nicer dorm rooms, wi-fi, cable, writing centers, etc. — that cost money. The one thing I can say isn’t the problem, honestly, is tenure. Tenure protects the bad eggs and gives those who “can’t do” a teaching job, that’s certain, but a vast majority of faculty work their rears off writing papers, winning grants, and teaching students just to get tenure.

But the problem here isn’t that colleges are tone-deaf to the rising costs. It’s that as a society we think it’s perfectly acceptable to pass the full cost of a four year degree off onto students. If they’re unable to afford it, tough. This despite the desperate needs we have in this country for well-trained scientists, nurses, accountants, technicians, programmers, and thinkers. This is a post-manufacturing America we’re living in, after all; if our children stand a chance in a world where a Chinese peasant can build toys for $1/hour and an Indian college graduate will code for 1/5 what an American developer makes, we have to give them the best shot we can at winning the global economic game.

And that’s the weird conundrum we’re in. We throw the kids in the pool saying “Learning to swim is what we all must do!” then yelling “You can figure out how to swim on your own!” from our deck chair. We can’t have it both ways. Godin, I think, wants to have it both ways.

Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high school students now? We will waive the admission fee! We have a one page application! Apply! This is some of the most amateur and bland direct mail I’ve ever seen. Why do it?

Biggest reason: So the schools can reject more applicants.

Here Godin looks at a pig, walks around the pig, pets the pig, stares at the pig’s snout, and announces it’s an ostrich.

Why is university direct mail so bland? Three reasons, I think. One, it’s been done this way for a generation, and it’s hard to break out of that rut. Two, in order to break out of such a rut, you need creative, dynamic people — the sort of people who won’t work for universities because they can’t be paid enough. Three, universities are so tight on cash they can’t drop $100,000 on hiring a marketing firm filled with young Seth Godins to spruce up their images.

The best universities can do is pick up what they can during a downturn knowing they’ll be gone the moment the green shoots of an economic recovery appear. And during that collapse they’ll have no money to effectively execute such a plan. Or, they lean on young, green BS/MS marketing students who are just learning the ropes and don’t understand the university’s issues from a business perspective.

So 90% of college marketing is barebones, repeatable, and filled with tropes (such as Jared Spool’s Girls Under Trees) because that’s the best most schools can do. And if you’re a unit within a university, you have even less to rely on.

(This is not to knock the 10% of people in higher ed marketing that are doing innovative and remarkable stuff. I flip through the CASE awards every year and think how people are managing to do some spectacular pieces despite the lack of resources at hand.)

So the question to Godin is whether a university should be dropping $100,000 on hiring him to fix the “undifferentiated pieces of junk mail” problem, or whether they should be spending that $100,000 on scholarships. Or on maintaining a wireless network. Or, heaven forbid, cutting tuition.

As for the “increasing rejections” issue, it’s far from the truth. Maybe all that advertising draws more students and ups the rejection rate, but it’s just one factor in the mysterious US News formula. You could do as Clemson did — cut class size — and get a better ROI out of the rankings than you would with blasting eleventy-billion flyers out there. And remember, if it’s all less than compelling, why would you apply in the first place?

[Added 4/30/2010: Let me reiterate that last point, because I think it needs to be. Godin is saying these publications are less-than-compelling marketing pieces, and they're using them to bolster their reject rate. If schools are really trying to bolster their reject rate, why wouldn't they use COMPELLING media pieces? Wouldn't they have a far, far higher ROI? Wouldn't they be hiring marketing gurus? Godin, again, can't have it both ways. Either these marketing materials are useless, or they're compelling enough to skew reject rates. Which is it, Seth?]

College wasn’t originally designed to merely be a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that’s what it has become. The data I’m seeing shows that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn’t translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job or more happiness than a degree from a cheaper institution.

What data, Seth? Where? Because studies have shown that people with bachelor’s degrees earn substantially more than those with only a high school diploma. Yes, the ROI gap is closing due to the massive tuition increases, but it hasn’t closed yet. And consider the medical field, where 10 years of education will leave the average doctor with well over $150,000 in debt — schools are still churning out doctors every year.

And honestly, I think the primary issue here is that if you go into college without a plan, you’ll spend a decade wandering around making minimum wage waiting for your life to start. For the people who come to college for “binge drinking” this is the life they’ll end up with. But I’ve been teaching college students this quarter, and I work with college students, and I’m friends with college students, and I can tell you that almost all of them are driven to get an ROI out of college. They’re not in school to binge drink. They’re in school to learn and gain opportunities their parents never had. And binge drink. But only after binge studying.

The college that Seth (and I) went to, the place of Animal House and weed parties, is vanishing. What’s replacing it is an environment where kids work and study and push themselves. In other words, the institution Seth wants already exists right now. Yeah, still drinking, still drugs, still sex, but it’s all part of college and growing up, anyway.

Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-reward policies on institutions and rewarded schools that churn out young wanna-be professors instead of experiences that turn out leaders and problem-solvers.

As someone who’s had to go through the horrors of the re-accreditation process… bulls**t, Seth. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Outcomes are what drive accreditation. Measures. Goals. They’re not about high cost, high risk, low reward. It’s the opposite. It’s about getting schools to offer the low risk, high reward stuff that’s essential to an education. It’s also about making sure that a public health graduate will be what the public health organizations need, or a computer science graduate will be what software companies need.

And that means in some majors requiring practical aspects of the field be baked into the program. Internships. Practicums. And it also means taking a careful look at each class and each syllabus and asking whether the program is building future leaders.

Sure, in the sciences you’re churning out professors. But no business school would last if it were churning out professors. Ditto public health, nursing, forestry, veterinary science… hell, marketing!

Yes, online programs are struggling to get recognized by accreditors. But we know that will be solved soon enough, just as when blogs weren’t considered worthy of producing news, or when online-only musicians weren’t “real” musicians.

Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue. The size of the library mattered. One reason to go to college was to get access. Today, that access is worth a lot less.

The premium services a university provides are ones that can’t easily be replicated by online learning, like one-on-one teacher interaction, or working in a research lab, or learning group dynamics. Whether those premiums are worth paying for will be the question students and colleges will have to answer over this next decade, but there are definitely benefits to such an experience. Yeah, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Costco destroyed the five-and-dimes and department stores, but Nordstrom is still around, because people are willing to pay for a great customer experience. And when the Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Costco of higher education finally arrive on the scene, they will leave a trail of destruction in their wake, but most colleges will survive, for the same reasons Nordstrom survives (and thrives).

I think we all know that some schools — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Penn — glide by because they have a great reputation that feeds back on itself. We also know that other schools are trading on a good name but are shadows of what their reputation suggests they are. And there are schools out there that are offering a superior education but don’t have the name brand that Harvard/Yale/Stanford/Penn do. But such it is in any industry.

Yeah, my college degree is nowhere close to my chosen field (which, mind you, didn’t exist until about my junior year of high school). So you could argue my education was meaningless. But college also taught me how to think critically, read widely, and write clearly. It exposed me to the full spectrum of the liberal arts, giving me ideas and thoughts that I’ve been able to port into my chosen field. I don’t think I’d be the success I am if it weren’t for my college education.

Could I have received that education outside of the ivory tower for a fraction of the cost? Perhaps. Perhaps if there were an internship in web development I could have taken right out of high school… oh, wait, I graduated in 1990, a year after Berners-Lee first proposed the World Wide Web and three years before Mosaic, the first viable web browser, became available. So I guess that’s not an option.

Could I have done anything else? Sure. Worked a job. Taken a gap year. And eventually I would have probably made my way to college. But maybe not. I think I made the right decision to go to college, even if at times it feels like I’ve lost a few years to indecision and feeling myself out.

But my big problem with Seth’s line of thinking is he’s throwing rocks at the ivory tower without understanding what’s inside that tower. It’s different over here, Seth. Maybe you should climb down from your marketing tower and come see what the modern university is like. You’d be surprised, I think, to see what it’s really like — that students are getting a quality education with a solid ROI despite everything going against higher ed right now. Maybe it’s time you taught a class, or just spent a few days helping people like me figure out how to market their university school with no budget whatsoever. You’re certainly welcome to show up at my office and offer to pitch in.

Climb down, Seth. Come find the truth over here where we dream of just having a marketing budget that matches your honorarium.

About two years ago I first conveyed this shift in direction in a comment on Zeldman’s post on the vanishing personal site. Last month a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor found that quote and my dying blogs and e-mailed me asking if I could elaborate further on my comment. The result of that e-mail conversation became about 1/3 of his article on whether blogging has peaked.

Since a few people have been asking me to elaborate on my comments (and more than a few have been asking me when I’m going to blog about the article) I thought I’d post my full response to his questions. (The nice thing about Mr. Shaer is he did a great job distilling my long rambles without losing the meaning of what I was trying to say. Seriously, you young ink-stained wretches, take a lesson from him.)

My suspicion is that blogging, of the personal and long-form variety, is down across the board – and that it will continue to decline in popularity in coming months. Do you agree?

I don’t think blogging is dying. I think it’s maturing.

In the early days of blogging it was a way for people to share links, post small thoughts (like a journal), interact with their community through comments, and every once in a while turn out a 2000 word post. Facebook has taken over most of these functions — sharing links, posting small thoughts (as status messages), and interacting with your community. Twitter also usurped the same roles from blogs, albeit on a smaller and more agile platform. But the one thing Facebook and Twitter has not been able to do effectively is long-form writing. That’s still the purview of blogs.

And honestly, I think that’s what blogs are for. Sharing small pieces of data like links over blogs was like owning a heavy-duty pickup that you only used to pick up bread and milk at the grocery store. Blogs are meant for people for whom being a writer, being a creator, is a passion, or perhaps a requirement of life. They’re meant for people for whom Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” question can’t always be answered in 500 characters or less.

Blogging will become a tool more for writers, I believe. Facebook, Twitter, and their successors are going to be the glue that holds online communities together, but they’ll still be linking to blogs. (Can you remember the last time you saw a Facebook post or a tweet sharing a link to a Facebook note?)

Would you tell me a bit about your decision to shutter your blog? Was it a lack of time? Was it the format itself? Something else entirely?

Shuttering my blog… I shuttered one blog (clientandserver.com) because I was going to fold it into my personal site (dylanwilbanks.com) for personal branding purposes. Between work, home, and projects, I just haven’t had the time to really sit down and complete the integration. Meanwhile, I just haven’t sat down and written anything.

But I also think my writing has shifted. Twitter (dylanw) has taken up a lot of my focus. Unlike most people I know, I like the 140 character limit. It forces me to keep my thoughts short, to the point, and pithy. Meanwhile, with the time constraints on my life I struggle to sit down and churn out 1000 words to discuss something that needs 1000 words to discuss. (But here’s the strange part — I can do that all the time with blog comments and MetaFilter posts. So responding to someone’s idea doesn’t seem to be the issue.) Twitter and Facebook let
me share small thoughts with my community, and right now all I can manage is small thoughts.

I want to post to my blog more. In fact, I was planning on taking the Project52 challenge (http://project52.info/) to force myself to start blogging again, at least once a week. Six weeks in, no posts.

I don’t think the problem is the format. I think the problem is getting off the couch. (And now that you’re asking about it, maybe I will try to get something posted. )

My wife, in contrast, feels like Twitter is stifling; she has two blogs she regularly posts to. (Her reasoning is she’s an unpublished author who needs to be on the web where her writing can be Googled. Still, she’s posting to her blog because she enjoys writing, not because it’s a required chore of trying to get a book sold.)

Do you know other folks who have given up on blogging for, say, Twitter?

I know a few people who have shifted to Twitter and away from blogs, but most of them still use their blogs for the long-form writing they can’t do on Twitter; they haven’t outright “abandoned” their blog as much as dropped from a few posts a week (or day) to a few posts a year. (I can get you names if you’d like.) I’ve heard of a few people abandoning their blog for Facebook, but I can’t think of anyone off-hand. The reasoning there is that Facebook provides them with the privacy a public blog doesn’t have.