Tags: intros

There’s the old adage “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. Or to put it more broadly, “everyone else is doing it.”

It’s dispiriting how often this explanation is given as justification for a dubious design decision, from home-page carousels to cookie banners.

Nic Chan has written a great post about designing a contact form and how the process was derailed by the client pointing to other people’s contact forms …even when they’ve got very, very different user needs.

It’s especially depressing when “everyone else is doing it” is used a substitute for any kind of accountability.

Building an email service that’s going to track when people click on links in an email? That sounds dodgy. On the other hand, everyone else is doing it.

Building a straightforward website, but making it a single-page app with client-side React that will be barely work on some devices and networks? That seems over-engineered. On the other hand, everyone else is doing it.

Sometimes the “everyone else is doing it” phenomenon leads to a chain reaction where nobody even knows why anyone ever did it in the first place.

Remember Flash? Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but everyone else was doing it.

Instead of getting rid of the intros, we got “skip intro” links instead. This link was guaranteed to have a 100% clickthrough rate.

I’ve noticed something similar with conference talks. So many of them begin with a little spiel about the speaker, their background, and their work experience.

This might be interesting information, but this isn’t the right time or place for it. It’s already on the conference website, in the conference programme, and has probably just been reiterated by the conference host who just introduced the speaker.

When I’ve asked why people do this, the responses generally come down to “everyone else is doing it.” It’s become an expected part of the conference talk, just like a Flash intro used to be an expected part of a website.

When I’m curating a conference, I like to send speakers some information to help them prepare their talk. Some of this is practical stuff, like the tech set-up. Some of it is guidance for the slides, like ensuring sufficient colour contrast. And then there’s this:

Please don’t begin your talk with an introduction about yourself and your work history. You’ll be introduced on stage so it would be a shame to just repeat all that again. Also, it just gets in the way of the actual content of your talk. No need to provide your bona-fides.

Personally, I just find it super cringe. That’s why I don’t do it if I’m giving a talk myself.

As a host however, it’s a big part of my job. It’s way less cringe to have someone else big you up before the talk then doing it yourself.

Here Dragons Abound: The Forever Project

I think that working on your own website can be a good Forever Project.

It’s an open-ended topic that you can explore for a long time without running out of challenges.

Also, this is spot-on:

Compare two different situations where you tell a story at a party. In the first situation, you tell the story in a corner to one or two people, who are totally interested and smiling. In the second situation, you tell the story in the center of the party with a large group of people around you, but they’re almost all bored and uninterested, talking amongst themselves and largely ignoring you. The first situation sounds better, right? Well, that’s the non-obvious benefit of blogging. There are a load of people out there blogging, and almost all of them are better writers and better looking than you. Nobody is going to read your blog about frabulizing widgets unless they really care about frabulizing widgets. So it’s not going to be a big audience, but it should be an interested audience. And I think you’ll find that you get 90% of the benefits of socialization from a handful of readers as you would get from a sea of readers.