A Hands Off Underreaction
by Dave Tufts - December 7, 2007 / 11:22am View more articles
Recently Rob posted a blog with a long binary string in its title – 73 unspaced ones and zeros. The enormous title blew out the design of our homepage. The long title stretched across the shorter columns.
We spent a minute discussing possible "fixes". Do we add functionality to our CMS to hyphenate words? Do we automatically break long unbroken strings?
Our eventual conclusion was to uderreact and do nothing. We decided the author knows more about his content than the back-end CMS. The author can easily view and edit his content if it doesn't look good. If our CMS does nothing, the worst-case scenario is that the homepage looks a little weird until the content is edited. That seems preferable over automatically altering the author's content with hyphens, spaces, or breaks.
Once you start auto-correcting a whole new series of problems and usability issues are introduced. Ever try starting a sentence with a lower case letter in Microsoft Word? iMarc finds Word's auto-correcting difficult to work around. Sometimes it's best to step aside and let things happen as they were written.
The hands-off approach is difficult. Developers like to develop features. Sales people like to sell features. But sometimes it's better to stop tinkering and treat your software like the country mom treats her child in the magazine article, City Mom, Country Mom (excerpt below). This article, originally published in Down East Magazine, touches on the hands-off approach, letting things happen, and worst-case scenarios.
One summer, the author's family leaves the padded playgrounds and baby proofed city for a month in the country.
Viewed from New York, the land of padded playgrounds and antibacterial gel, Maine can seem like the land of the parentally supervised toddler death wish. Another "we're not in New York anymore" moment occurred during a Fourth of July cookout.
Our host's backyard concluded at the crest of a steep hill that was littered with an assortment of children's riding vehicles – a plastic Tonka truck, a Radio Flyer car, a wagon. At the bottom of the hill loomed the blunt corner of a garden-bed railway tie, a sharp fence post, and a number of big trees. My Manhattan-patented Parental QuickStock Vision registered the serious-injury possibilities as infinite.
A little girl hopped on the plastic Tonka truck and sped down the hill, bull's-eyeing for a tree and capsizing halfway. She stood up, righted the truck, and pulled it up the hill to go again. Soon all the kids were zooming down the hill, their parents hollering an exaggerated "oof" after every particularly impressive wipeout.
To defend the Maine way, the worst-case scenario for the Tonka-truck hill ride is a hospital trip, yes — but all other scenarios aren't only a blast, they also allow kids to feel that they have a creative, confidence-boosting stake in beating back their own boredom.
You could argue that an underreacting parent helps a child overcome fears that might otherwise be legitimized by a full-scale freak-out.
—Heidi Julavits, Country Mom, City Mom
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http://web.stlawu.edu/ruszknis/allourart/dailyvideo/
This is the result of letting your kid sled down your icy driveway every day to the bus in a small, Maine town: good grades and an addiction to adrenaline.
This is something that really just happened recently with our two kittens. I kept yelling at them to stay away from our pellet stove, but they wouldn't listen. It only took one of them one touch and the worst half-meow/half-howl ever for everyone to learn their lesson.
They haven't thought about it again ever since.
The mom in Maine certainly had a tough time letting go and watching her kid whiz down a hill.
The same goes with our CMS. We often have a tough time seeing the way our unrestrictive CMS is used (though we only advocate beating internal users...never clients). As the parent of our CMS, it would be safer for us to impose design and content restrictions. We'd be sure the client could never wreck our design, but it would be at the expense of the client's own content.
What's more important the design or the content? Wherever possible, we put this decision in the hands of the author not the CMS.
But yes, authors, not hacks, should be the ones who handle the design limitations if and when they show themselves.
Design must support content, yet content without design is merely a raw data stream. They are completely dependent upon each other; trying to separate them leads to content that is difficult to absorb. Perhaps in an ideal world, the author would create that raw data stream and a designer would thoughtfully consider how to present it to the ultimate consumer, then implement it. In practice, that's an expensive proposition, so we build CMS systems instead, and the job of the designer and developer becomes one of making the best possible presentation defaults for the expected content, and the job of the author expands to include some presentation issues such as line break issues.
Like the lightly supervised child, in a CMS the author takes responsibility for the result of their content choices. There is no supervisor to protect them from any but the gravest of mistakes.
As designers of the visual presentation and of the content management systems, we have to choose whether to coddle the author -- which prevents them ever from learning -- or whether to let them make mistakes, discover and correct them, and apply the lessons learned.
In my case, I broke the layout, discussed it with Dave, hit upon the idea of breaking the string into octets -- then we reverted to broken mode and presented it as a case for discussion. Everyone gets a chance to learn from that mistake.
(A side note on "more fluid designs": You may recall the many attempts at "fluid" page layouts in the early 00's. The idea was noble: make a layout that accommodated any content and any web browser. Sadly, most were disasters if the browser was more than 1000px wide. Readability was terrible as line lengths increased without a corresponding increase in leading to enable line-to-line eye tracking. Not to mention they just looked bad. I think today we could manipulate the DOM on the fly to better optimize text for varying content and window views, but I'm not certain it's worth the effort.)
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