Listen to The Web Ahead, Episode 10

A friend of mine has a new fireplace, and has struggled to learn the art to lighting a fire. The first year of our new fireplace was fraught with false starts, incessant relighting, and frustrating fire baby sitting to keep the flames alive. After a great deal of experimentation and some tutelage from friends, I’ve finally figured out how to light a fire with just one match and keep it going with little effort.

How Fires Work

Before you can master the art of fire building, you need to first understand how fire works. Fires need three very important things:

1. Fuel
2. Oxygen
3. A Spark

Okay, you probably knew that, but often people forget these important points in the heat of the moment (pun! groooan!). When you’re stacking up the kindling and wood, don’t forget to leave space so your fire can breath. You can’t just heep mounds of paper, kindling and wood. If a fire can’t breath, it can’t burn.

Here’s another important detail. Fire burns from light, combustable items to dense, less combustable items. There’s a term for this—transference. Place the highly combustable items on the bottom so it can burn up to transfer fire to the dense fuel above that burns longer. Remember, you’re moving fire from the match to paper to kindling to wood. Transference of the flame from one fuel to the next is the secret to lighting a fire.

You don’t need a ton of paper or kindling to start a fire. A little will do, with a couple of tricks up your sleeve.

Step 1: The Setup

Start building your fire by laying two large, split pieces of wood in a V formation with the point facing the back of the fire box. This will serve as the support for logs above while cradling combustable fuel inside the V. Dry oak, walnut, or other hard woods are best. Stay away from pine as it will coat your chimney with pine tar.

If you’ve burned a fire in your fireplace before, pull out all of the charcoal and partially burned wood and place it in the front of the fire box for use in step 4. This will be useful when getting the fire started as it’s dry and will create a sustained burn.

Step 2: Adding Paper

Add paper between the logs. Don’t over stuff it, and avoid using paper with full color ink. Never use things like pine cones indoors as they can coat your chimney with pine tar and cause chimney fires.

Step 3: Add Kindling or Fat Wood

Add kindling like small sticks, chips left over after chopping wood, or get a little fancier and use Fat Wood, small, natural sticks that burn hot and long enough to get your fire really going. I use just three small pieces of Fat Wood as my kindling. Nothing else is needed.

Step 4: Add Charcoal

If you do have some charcoal left in the firebox from your previous fire, add that to the next layer. It’ll catch fire easily from the kindling or Fat Wood below, and will put a sustained flame on the logs you’ll add above.

Step 5: Add Logs

Place two logs on top of the V formation, placing them parallel to the opening of the firebox. The V formation of logs below will act as the support for the top layer of logs and will keep them from falling in on the stack. Now you’ve got a combustable center of your fire stack surrounded by logs that will burn for a long time. Be sure to leave some space between the top two logs so the fire can get plenty of air.

Now you’re ready to light your fire. Strike a match, and light the paper in multiple places. Let the fire burn for a little while. When the logs are burning and the combustable center is running low on fuel, use some fire tongs to draw the bottom logs together, tightening the V formation and keeping the heat concentrated. As your fire continues to burn, you’ll develop a hot coal bed that will ignite any log you toss on instantly.

Now, go find yourself an adult beverage and warm those cold toes, my friend.

The sites, products, and brands that resonate most with people today are the ones that are human, honest and have a clear personality. It’s through personality and emotion that companies are forging real relationships with their customers and standing out in a sea of competitors. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. There are others in the UX community and even in the VC and startup communities that are seeing a serious shift towards designing for emotion.

I’ve been wondering, how should designers, startups, UX folks and companies rethink how they present themselves and become more human? How do we go about making products feel like people? How do transcend usability and create experiences that are delightful? These are the questions that sparked the research and ideas presented in my new book, Designing for Emotion.

Packed into this tiny, purple volume you’ll find core principles of psychology, a plethora of case studies, techniques that will help you make a human connection through design and data that will convince skeptical management. This book is the culmination of four years of experimenting with emotional design in my work, more than a year of research, and countless interviews with other web and product designers who are uncovering new connections between design and emotion.

It’s so gratifying to hold the culmination of these efforts in my hands, and how cool it is to see it on tablet devices too. French, Korean, and Russian readers will be happy to know that translations are in the works.

I have endless hugs and high fives for the brilliant folks that helped me craft this book. Jeffrey, Mandy, Jason, Krista, Rob, Whitney, Rose and Jared, I thank you for making this little purple book sing.

I hope you enjoy Designing for Emotion, and I hope it inspires your work. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the book and your perspective on emotional design.

Mobile First

It’s an honor to publish with A Book Apart, but it’s twice as nice to have Designing for Emotion launch along side Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski. The mobile experience is no longer a “nice to have” feature in a project. It’s essential. Luke’s book will walk you through core mobile design strategies and help you see how central mobile design is to all interface design. It’s an amazing book that I am certain you’ll enjoy.

We’ve spent the past two years cooing over social networking, but the shine is starting to dim. As we move on to new objects of affection, I can’t help but notice one tangible outcome of our revolution: for better or worse, we’re a little bit more authentic.

We’re openly sharing the mundane moments of our lives, exposing our insecurities, passions, flaws and raw emotions. Our public face is no longer so different from our private one. That shift changes our expectations of the brands, products and services we consume. We want them to be as human as we are.

buy issue 211 of .net magazine »

Here’s where I’ll be speaking:

February 3, 2009: Web Directions North at Denver, CO 

March 16th, 2009: No Web Professional Left Behind at SxSW Interactive

April 28th, 2009: Social CMS at Voices That Matter: Web Design

May 5th, 2009: Findability Bliss Through Web Standards at An Event Apart Seattle

June 23th, 2009: Findability Bliss Through Web Standards at An Event Apart Boston

Now that the manuscript has been transformed into a glossy cover-wrapped volume, I thought I’d share with you my experience. I’ve often wondered what it’s like to devote yourself to a single topic for such an extended period of time, and how the publishing process works. It’s something that is often romanticized as an extended, solitary expedition into deep, meaningful thoughts. Although there’s a bit of romance in the writing process, there’s also a lot of research, attention to form and continuity, second guessing of yourself, and old fashioned hard work along the way.

As a teacher for nearly a decade, I’ve become accustomed to reading my student’s faces to determine whether or not I’m making any sense. Writing doesn’t afford this luxury. For months on end I wrote and wrote sometimes wondering if my extensive passages would provide enough information to the reader to help them grasp my point, or maybe I was getting too detailed which could be patronizing and slow. Of course, my editors Jeff Riley, and Jonathan Snook helped me answer these internal questions along the way, but the feedback loop is a lot different than explaining something in person and changing tack immediately when you see your message isn’t hitting its mark. Somewhere along the way I got over the second guessing and plowed ahead. After chapter 3 I felt like I had found my stride, and the overall structure of the book started to become more apparent.

The Process of Publishing and the People Involved

There were a lot of people involved in the publishing process – a whole team, in fact. As the acquisitions editor, Michael Nolan received my written proposal for the book and a sample chapter then presented it to a board of publishing gurus at Peachpit who evaluated its relevance to the target audience, looked at other books that already explored similar topics, and made a final decision on whether or not to publish it. This was a pretty slow process. I submitted the proposal in April then bit my nails until late July when the official green light was handed down. The writing process didn’t start until August of 2007 -six months after my initial conversation with Michael. After the proposal was accepted Michael acted as the project manager for the book, coordinating the entire team.

Jeff Riley was my development editor. His job was to provide feedback on the form and structure of my writing. He evaluated all formatting for consistency, passed each chapter on to Jonathan Snook the technical editor who evaluated all code and techy concepts, then passed the combined edits and feedback to me. I then made the requested changes or decided to stick to my guns at times and leave things as they were. My changes went back to Jeff for another pass and prep for the production team who handled the formatting and layout.

While I was writing, the design team was working on the page layout and various elements that would be included in each chapter. They used a sample chapter to design the treatments for tables, figures, captions, tips, and various sidebar elements. This was shared with me for feedback, and revised one more time before placing the manuscript into the page templates.Kate Reber – the production editor – coordinated all of the pre-press production of the book. Once she had all of the content into the design we went through each chapter three times to tweak the layout and catch any oversights. A proof reader also went through the entire book a few times again checking for errata and inconsistencies. I’m not sure how many times we all read the book, but I think I read through each page about 8 to 10 times. I think I could now recite it from cove to cover.

A Little Overzealous – Too Many Chapters

I had a lot to say on the subject of findability, so much so that I wrote 5 chapters too many to fit in the book. I started to get nervous about the length in October, and by December we realized that there was roughly 106 pages too many. I felt like I was lopping limbs off of my first born as we excised chapters to make the target length, but luckily all of this content is published on the book’s companion website http://buildingfindablewebsites.com as free PDF downloads. Although these chapters aren’t in print, they’re not lost.

It’s extremely satisfying to wrap up such a long, intense process and hold the final product in your hands. I hope this book achieves my original goal – to create a better awareness of findability and its close relationship to web standards best practices. You can join the findability discussion in the Facebok group.

If you are going to be at SXSW this year or any of the other conferences where I’ll be speaking, please do introduce yourself. I’d love to hear your perspective on the book.

An Event Apart New Orleans will be held at the posh Hilton Riverside April 24 – 25. The list of speakers and topics covered is fantastic:

• Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS, presenting “Underpants Over My Trousers”
• Aaron Gustafson, co-author of AdvancED DOM Scripting, presenting “Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript”
• Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious, conducting “On-the-Spot Usability Reviews”
• Cameron Moll, author of Mobile Web Design, presenting “Good vs. Great Design”
• Brian Oberkirch, Publisher of Like It Matters, presenting “Kick it Like Pelé”
• Jason Santa Maria, designer at Happy Cog, presenting “Good Design Ain’t Easy”
• Dave Shea, co-author of Zen of CSS Design, presenting “Living, Breathing Design”
• Stephanie Sullivan, co-author of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3, presenting “Design Challenges, Standards Solutions”
• Jeff Veen, design manager at Google, presenting “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps”
• Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Web Sites, presenting “Findability Bliss Through Web Standards SEO”

Plus our hosts Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer will be speaking too.

• Eric Meyer, author of CSS: The Definitive Guide, presenting both “The Lessons of CSS Frameworks” and “Debug / Reboot”
• Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing With Web Standards, presenting both “Understanding Web Design” and “Web Standards: The Return of the King”

Registration for the conference is now open. I do hope you can join us for what’s sure to be a battery charging, mind opening, biegnets chomping good time in the Big Easy.

Here’s what these paragons of the Web industry are saying in support of the book:

Companies waste fortunes seeking a magic bullet for Search Engine Optimization. But the keys to honest, effective web findability are appropriate writing and semantic markup. Aarron Walter’s wonderfully lucid and informative book tells everything you need to know to get your web content (or your client’s) in front of as many appreciative readers as possible.

Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found. In Building Findable Web Sites, Aarron Walter provides an invaluable guide to avoiding obscurity on today’s cluttered Web.

I’ve submitted a proposal myself, and I’m going to shamelessly lobby for your vote! Here’s the synopsis of what my talk will cover:

Title: Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond

Why Vote For My Panel?

• Web standards and search engine optimization go together. I’ll outline how using web standards will help make your site easier to find via search engines
• Do search engines really give a damn if you follow web standards? My panel will give you the answers
• I’ll discuss how Accessibility and SEO goals often overlap
• I’ll provide info on how technologies such as Ajax and Flash can cause problems for search engines and what you can do to address the problems
• My talk will provide plenty of practical info that you can use on any site
• The information is based upon my forthcoming book for New Riders entitled Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond to be released early in 2008

You’ll need to register an account with the panel picker (don’t have to sign up for the conference) in order to vote. If there’s something specific you’d like to learn about in this panel, shoot me an email and let me know.

I appreciate your vote! http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/436

Here are the slides and audio from the talk, which are also archived in the resources section.

Slides | Podcast

I’m currently working on a book for New Riders titled Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond that, as the title suggests, looks at Findability solutions from the developer’s perspective, providing code examples, and best practices. It will be released in February of 2008.