Copies of Cadence & Slang Mini and stickers were mailed out today (January 12). People in the US and Canada should receive them in the next few days. People outside North America, hopefully within a couple of weeks. My computer-inclined butt is a relative newbie to the world of snail mail, so I hope I put on enough stamps for everyone and filled out the right forms and your addresses are written correctly and the right things are packed.

If anything has gone wrong, please forgive me. I am fallible, especially since I am doing this entire thing by myself. Then send me an email at nickd at nickd dot org explaining what went wrong. Maybe your copy of Mini has the wrong pages. (I collated all of them by hand.) Maybe you didn't receive stickers. Maybe you didn't receive your copy of Mini. I hope none of these are true, but should they be, I'll try to fix them as quickly as possible.

In lieu of a packing manifest, I enacted a simpler system. I ran through all the envelopes and placed little marks below your addresses, to indicate what you're supposed to receive. If your envelope has a blue mark on the front, I should have packed just stickers. If your envelope has a silver mark on it, both stickers and Mini should be inside. The way my project's rewards work out, those are the only two possibilities, so it made (way) more sense to cut the number of steps in packing, and avoid writing up bills of sale and so on.

It's really exciting to have these out the door. I have a few extra copies of Mini, and many (like, uh, over a thousand) stickers sitting around. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy your rewards!

So this happened. And then fifteen minutes later
that happened, and I was curious, so I check my email. And I see the total on the project has broken - nay, demolished - $9,800. And so I present to you:
Cadence & Slang Is Funded, Via iPhone Screenshots
(Cascade and Tettnang are hop varietals.)

Hilariously, two backers were already in town for the holiday weekend, and we had already planned to grab a beer with them. So I show up, big bear hugs all around, I order one of these, &c. &c. Which is why I didn't update last night.

So: we did it. Cadence & Slang will see the light of day by the end of 2010. And who's the publisher? You. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your generosity and faith in this. Thank you for promoting this. Thank you for telling your friends and getting excited about this. I can't wait to show you my work, and I hope to keep you involved in the whole process.

But there looms the question: what happens if we raise more money than $9,800? This isn't rhetorical: we're already almost at $11,000. I'm going to get a few more quotes from the printer regarding spot colors, process color, maybe even making the book hardcover.

We've already made our goal, which means I get to sleep a lot better. But we can always improve the product with more funding. We have three more days to raise enough to cover even better printing, better paper stock, and a better cover. I plan to make no profit from this book's publication. Every single dollar pledged between now and Friday goes straight to the book.
So let's finish this with a bang!

Six days left. If we don't raise $9,800 by 9PM CST on Friday December 04 (03:00 UTC Saturday), this is all for naught.

We're raising around $300 every day, and we have a tick more than $2,000 left to go. Most of our pledges so far have been $40 preorders. If only fifty people preorder books in the next six days, we're done. That's it.

So things look pretty encouraging, but we can't slack off in the home stretch. On every single Kickstarter project so far, the majority of funds are pledged in their final days. Please tell everyone you know about this - tweet it, Facebook it, Tumblr it. If just a third of you convince a friend to preorder, then we get to party early.

Another big help: some enterprising backers have posted this project to two popular link blogs. Vote for Cadence & Slang on Hacker News. Vote for Cadence & Slang on Digg. If this project is voted onto either site's front page, it would be a huge publicity boost during a critical time. You can register for free accounts and tap the buttons (HN, Digg) to register a positive vote. (Thanks so much to Eliot Sykes and Kev Burns, Jr. for posting this on their own.)

Lastly, over the past few days, I've worked on a new site for the book, which I'll launch if the project is fully funded. It'll contain information about preordering for the next few months, between now and when the book is printed. It'll also have a bit more about the book's contents.

I'm really happy about how the site looks. Hopefully we'll get to use it.

Slightly impertinent: I've just added a new gift for any backers feeling particularly flush in the net two weeks. Pledge $1,000 for a full-page advertisement in Cadence & Slang. I've waffled on the idea of advertising for a long time, although I'm already devoting a page in the book towards listing and thanking all of my backers. After a few conversations on the topic, I decided to pull the trigger on it. If you know anybody that's looking for some novel, long-term advertising, by all means send them my way.
Mostly pertinent: Should Cadence & Slang become fully funded, I'd like to talk about the future of this project: what will happen, and when. Note that most of these dates are worst-case estimates; many will happen sooner.
December 04: We pass $9,800 in pledges. I write a tearful thank-you to my backers. I place incoherent phone calls that involve a lot of yelling. I write incoherent text messages that involve a lot of emoji.
December 05: My friend and I throw an annual holiday beer tasting for our closest friends, which we've spent the past fifteen months preparing for. I do not cry tears of bitter sorrow into a beer of which only 300 bottles exist.
December 06: I resume writing Cadence & Slang. (Per the previous post, I'm not writing for the next two weeks to focus entirely on fundraising.)
December 07: I send emails to those who ordered usability reviews, requesting more information for what they want me to review, and developing individual timelines with each one of them. I also set up a page for people to pre-order Cadence & Slang who, heaven forbid, didn't back my project in time.
December 20: Amazon removes the hold on my Kickstarter funds and they hit my bank account, which will go above $80 for the first time in two years. At this point I plan to move them into a savings account or short-term CD, for I won't be actually spending your money on printing and shipping until mid-to-late 2010. (If you have any good suggestions on where to conveniently store around ten thousand dollars for a short period of time, let's talk. I know a lot about interaction design, but very little about fiscal wonkery.)
February 01, 2010: I finish Cadence & Slang Mini, request your addresses, and mail out the copies. I'll also mail out the stickers at this point.
April 01: I finish the first draft of the entire manuscript, and send it on to a few friends and backers for revisions and editing. By this point I hope to be done with all of your usability reviews.
July 01: I finish writing Cadence & Slang and send the first draft off to the printer.
November 01: I receive the book from the printer, request your addresses again, and start shipping out your orders.
Partially pertinent: Some people have asked me how I came up with the figure of $9,800. I received a quote of $9,200 from my printer, and added $600 to account for shipping charges and mailing materials (bubble wrap, envelopes, etc) for both sets of books I ship (normal and Mini).

That $9,200 figure includes both printing the books and shipping them across the pond to me. (My printer has offices in both Chicago and Hong Kong.)
Cadence & Slang will be a perfect bound paperback, DIN A5 (which is a European printing size, equivalent to about ~5.8"x8.3"), offset printed at ~2,400DPI on natural-colored paper with a laid finish.

Which is all a long way of saying: if this project gets funded, the book is going to look awesome.

Random administrivia: You may be wondering how the project's video sounds so good. My friend Maya Kuper of Studiomedia Recording is to credit for that one. I propped her on various "micro-blogging" services in the past, but I should give a formal mention here. We devoted an entire evening to get it right, and her patience and talent can't go unmentioned. If you have any need to record voiceovers or music in the future, and you live in Chicagoland, now you know where to go.
Focused administrivia: Fifteen days left. Getting down to the proverbial wire. It feels pretty great to hit various milestones, but in the long run, they don't mean very much if the project isn't funded in full. It's a little disingenuous to throw a party over the momentous occasion of hitting halfway if we end with only 60% and nothing comes of it. So for the next two weeks, I'm focusing entirely on getting us to the end of this project. I'll restart writing on December 06, and should be finished with my next draft of chapter 1 by December 15.

I spent three hours yesterday talking with a Kickstarter administrator, about 5 feet away from where I'm typing this. After sleeping on it and thinking quite a lot about what all was said, one major thing stuck with me: the most successful project creators bust their ass to get the word out. Quite a bit of that is through tweeting and facebooking and tumblring and complaining on my own part. But I'm not as well-known in my field as certain other people, and tweetblrbooking can only take you so far when your initial audience is, by default, substantially less.

There are many ways to bridge that gap, but probably the most effective - and certainly the most common - is through word of mouth. If I talk with the 200-odd folks who follow me on Twitter about Cadence & Slang, then I'm reaching 200 people. But if I compel a tenth of those people to write about this project on their own terms, then I'm suddenly reaching vastly more than 200. Orders of magnitude more. (And then the people reached thuswise write about it, and so on, etc., into infinity, and then suddenly I have my own Wikipedia article, a third of which is accurate.)

This means: the more people that you tell about this project, the better. This also means: this is about you just as much as it is me. When you tell others - via Twitter, through personal emails, carrier pigeon, trebuchet, paper airplanes, anything - you benefit, too, because you're increasing the likelihood that you get whatever you pledged for, and you're supporting independent publishing in a way that didn't exist just six months ago.
I think Kickstarter projects are all about this sort of support. For example, if you go to my own Kickstarter profile, you'll see the project I started, but also the ones that I've chosen to back. Because of the financial stakes involved, people don't back projects lightly. It's not like favoriting a photo on Flickr or liking a post on Facebook. Showing your volitional support for a cause, and putting your money behind it, can become a point of pride - sort of a way through which one can suss out your values and beliefs as a backer. I value ridiculous emoji translations of classic novels. You may value something different, like saving an indie music festival or a hilariously inadvisable homerolled fusion reactor. Or Cadence & Slang.
Which is all to say that quite a few very complex things can be pulled out of a mechanism that is, at its core, astonishingly simple. There are so many intangible psychological aspects to the otherwise simple premise of home-rolling your own fundraising drive that pausing to think about them can drive a project creator nuts. When do you launch? How do you market it? What gifts do you offer? How do you make it beneficial for pledgers? How intimately do you link those pledgers with your own project's narrative? What's your project's final dollar amount? How much of the project are you willing to bankroll? Do you highball or lowball the estimate? How do you determine the end date?

Thinking about all that, this is one of the scariest things that I've ever done.
Next: How I came up with the estimate, timeline, and logistics.

These days: I've posted a new entry to I see what you did there. I reviewed a site that you may know some about. I'm almost done with chapter 1 edits; I spent the past three days writing an extensive subsection about customer service, and I'm really happy with the way that it's turned out.

I've also been posting quite a few links about design and other topics to my Twitter account. I'd appreciate getting in touch with you there!
Tomorrow: we have only 17 days left. Which means that today, we have only 18 days left. That is not very many days. And have you seen the number up there? It's inched a tick higher, but we're not even halfway there yet.

If you - or somebody you know - pushes Cadence & Slang over the halfway point, the likelihood that we'll get to 100% is pretty darn high. Why, you ask? Because when it comes to big fundraising projects like this, people feel a lot more comfortable pledging for something that has a higher likelihood of success. Crossing the halfway point gives the impression that this entire venture is more trustworthy and substantial.

If you know any computer geeks, tell them about Cadence & Slang. If you run a weblog, write a post about Cadence & Slang. If you want to interview me to post somewhere, or if you want a personal write-up about the project, fire an email over to nickd [at] nickd [dot] org and we'll talk. This is a ludicrously critical time towards making sure that the book is fully funded - and as with all things Kickstarter, this is all or nothing. Last week: On a mostly-personal note, I accepted an offer from Groupon as their interaction designer. I start there on November 30, which is only 5 days before the end of this project. I'm extremely excited about this.

Get pumped! This is the home stretch!

Daniel just sent me his first sketch for the book: me!

This will probably go in some sort of extremely narcissistic "about the author" section, where I prattle on and on about how I won the TIME Magazine 2006 Person of the Year award.

Okay, I promise that's the end of project updates for a little bit. Three in two days is a lot.

If you pledged already, you received the login info for the private site, replete with actual book excerpts. Proof that the book isn't just a myth! Yes! More chapter 1 edits continue in the meantime, of course.

Right now, I'd like to talk to you about my writing process, timeline, habits, approach, etc.

I came up with the idea of the book last December. Every winter in Chicago I put together a huge project to pass the time when it's -40 out, two feet of snow are eternally on the ground, and it's always either dark or gray outside. For example, two years ago, I learned how to build and maintain bikes, and then built one myself. Three years ago, I conspired with some friends to write a book for my girlfriend about the city. Last winter, I decided on Cadence & Slang, and continuing that will of course be this winter's big project, too.
What you already know: I wrote an outline of the book, handmade little chapbooks of it, and sent them off to 100 people.
What you don't already know: This was the beginning of four more months of outlining. I took the wording for this chapbook, and made an actual outline out of it. I added some points in where there were logical holes, or where stuff seemed threadbare. Per the suggestions of colleagues from reading the original chapbook, I reworded a lot. Writing for Cadence & Slang began in mid-April, and this outline operated as a mission statement for the book, something to hold onto during uncertain times.

Part of this outline building involved doing a big literature review. The last major writing project I embarked on that was related to my career was my master's paper, which by definition required a formal review of the current research context, to justify my investigations. And while I'm not codifying this in a twenty-page summary in Cadence & Slang, it's absolutely informing my writing. I'm citing and quoting from what I've come across, and I think it's strengthened the text quite a bit, made it less insular, justified points that risk controversy.

One problem with doing this right now is that I no longer have access to a complete portrait of current academic literature, because it's so closed-off and I'm (obviously) not in graduate school anymore. So I had to make do with books. (Fortunately, books published today are more applicable to Cadence & Slang than research.) I set up an Amazon wishlist, and wrote to close friends pleading them to gift me stuff off of it. Because I'm clearly friends with the most generous and excellent people ever, several did.

In tandem, I did a huge search for stuff at my local library. I work only two blocks from the main branch, so I would go there on lunch breaks, and I outlined and xeroxed any books I needed that they didn't circulate. I checked out anything that they did, and outlined and xeroxed those on my own time. The result: a 500-page-thick stack of condensed information pertinent to Cadence & Slang, spanning four dozen books, three centuries, and many fields outside technology. All of it mashed down into one big contiguous lump.

All of this helps on another really important front: researching fields like architecture, urban planning, typography, cognitive science, and how best to run a delicatessen helps cast interaction design as something that affects every aspect of a user's experience. We say an awful lot about "experience design," but very little can back that up if we design with our own customs, our own language. Or if design just affects the front end of a product, and not how it performs, or how it's marketed or supported.

If a book about this field is going to be useful, it has to be a progression, or perhaps an amalgam, of principles that we see in other parts of our lives. Our users view technology in the same way: they may use a computer, or an iPod, or a cell phone, whatever, but they still have their own lives to live, and they usually aren't using technology for its own sake. So why should we come from a different perspective?

Hello! It's been a little while, but a ton of work has come together. I passed a big milestone last night: 30,000 words. But more important is this here Kickstarter project, so the book can be published in the first place. Again, I want to thank everybody for putting their faith in me over the past two months; it pretty much rules, and I can't begin to express my gratitude.
We have one month left as of today, and so far we haven't yet broken $4,000. (We're very, very close, though!) If you want to see Cadence & Slang find its way into print, please, please ask people to pledge. Even if they promise to later in the project, it makes no difference whether they pledge now or later, because nobody's cards are charged until the project ends (and if it's fully funded). I'd be able to sleep better at night knowing that the support is actually out there, and that folks are willing to back their words up. If you're reading this and on the fence, please donate today! Pre-orders are only $40, and you get a still-ridiculously-useful handmade outline of the book for just $20. (And if you want to change your pledge to something higher, click "Manage your pledge" on the project's front page.)

I've spent the past week working on edits to chapter 1, so I can strengthen the initial arguments as much as humanly possible. I've also sent a draft of the first 15 pages' revisions off to some friends and colleagues for review. I know that's not a whole lot to write about the book, but just those revisions have taken a considerable amount of time. When I'm not writing at night or on the weekend, I cram editing in on my trips on the El and bus, and during my lunch breaks. It's a lot of editing.

Finally, I spoke about Robert Hoekman's A List Apart article about usability testing and Lukas Mathis' rebuttal last time, and promised to offer some of my opinions.

There are a few things I love about Hoekman's article. He suggests tracking every single user click on a web site. Click statistics are relatively easy to implement, and can offer some extremely useful data about what navigation is (or isn't) being used, what links are (or aren't) being followed inside main content, etc. While some kinds of users could befuddle the data (for example, I'm one of those people who compulsively highlights blocks of text while reading articles on the Web - so I probably generate lots of click "noise"), and while click data may not be useful for software applications, it represents a good step for the Web, especially on sites that want to direct users towards some specific content or action.

Five-second tests sound like a great idea. I've never given one, but for sites that need as much clarity as humanly possible, which tend to perform only a couple of functions, five seconds lies at the high end of how long it should take users to recognize who you are, what you do, and how they can get things done. Think about how fast you browse the web: you likely skim text, gloss over things that doesn't clearly relate to the site itself (like advertising or "share this" links), and you spend as little time as possible on search engines. Five seconds is more patience than we give the hours of most peoples' work to get content online. I was inspired by this part: to be honest, I can't believe I hadn't thought of it previously.

So Hoekman's opinions about how to improve usability testing are pretty good. But those methods are a testament to why usability testing should be improved, and that it's potentially useful - not that it's a myth. The first half of that article attempts to debunk heuristic evaluation as unfocused, fraught with noise and conflicting opinions between ostensible "experts." Hoekman hits on some valid criticisms of usability testing, but they're not catastrophic enough to write off the entire field.

In two different examples, Hoekman cites tests that were run with the wrong set of users that the client wanted to target: existing ones, rather than new ones. And with the comparative usability tests among different teams, the goal was to find the right practices for usability testing in the first place. Of course each team would come up with their own heuristics. If each were testing according to the same heuristic, then it would be scientifically accurate. But each team was trying to do different things, measured against different standards. Heuristics should be developed with as much sensitivity to the user's and client's needs as possible, and they should be kept consistent among each test.

So, as Mathis argued, usability testing is apparently a myth because... bad testing yields bad results. This only gives me more conviction that we need to find ways to rigorize and strengthen testing methods.

If we assume that Hoekman's criticisms are valid, however, that means external usability testing services - which he recommends as an alternative - are useless as well. In fact, I disagree that external services are a preferable way to test in the first place. You gain the benefit of impartiality, but with many projects, you would have to be very precise in the demographic requirements. And it may take too long to get results back if you refine too strongly; UserTesting.com says one hour, but that's for people less fussy about who they get. And third-party testing is impossible if you're testing against existing users.

All this considered, I think there are two important takeaways: 1) usability testing is still good, but it needs to be refined a lot, and more conversations about big-picture stuff like this need to take place; and 2) if we're talking about big-picture stuff, it's a clear sign that our field is still pretty young, and trying to figure out how to take its tentative first steps. I'm really glad we're all talking about this, because it's important, and way too many organizations gloss over it.
Next: book excerpts‽

San Francisco ruled! We had a great time talking with old friends and colleagues about life, the book, etc. Great food, better conversation, gorgeous weather. And everyone I ran into seemed to be excited about Cadence & Slang.
On the book front: outlining continues, and I'm busy typing up many edits to chapter 2. Not a whole lot happened during the trip, but a lot of great conversation has redirected my attention, especially in the first chapter.

On the pledge front: right now we're up to 35%. But 50% of the project's time has lapsed. That's right: we're more than halfway done. I'm really excited about this, but we still need to work more before we're done. If you know anyone in the world of technology who could benefit from better design, or who likes reading about good design, I implore you to tell them about Cadence & Slang. Getting this book out there will help people that may not normally consider the nuances of great technology. Who knows, maybe it'll inspire somebody to get out there and kick ass. There are some ways to spread the word via fancy social media on the Kickstarter project page; use them, and an angel will get its wings.

Some interesting developments in the world of interaction design have happened since we last spoke, and I'd like to devote the rest of this update to them. There's Apple, of course, with their recent product announcement: the Magic Mouse. Apple have had a poor track record with their input devices; some duds exist, like the circular "hockey puck" mouse of the early aughts that doesn't teach users its proper orientation, or the late-nineties keyboard that required a tick too much effort to press the keys. But this - or at least the idea of this, considering that I haven't had the chance to play with one yet - looks pretty excellent. My only potential gripe: I would much rather use my thumb to trigger page back/forward, rather than a two-finger swipe. This follows the norm of most commercial mice available, and it seems to require less effort. Plus, the current Magic Mouse configuration leaves my thumb unused.

A List Apart flipped the proverbial card table by asserting that usability testing may not be useful in development. Naturally, only a few hours elapsed before the first eloquent rebuttal. Given how half of chapter 4 advocates discount usability testing methods and frequent design reviews, I'm extremely interested at the progress of this debate. But it's only a day old, it's a complex issue, and I want to give it its due. Expect me to write about this in a later post.

Barnes & Noble announced their Kindle-killer, the nook. I'm not wild about e-book readers for my own use, but this looks like a great (and highly welcome) step towards simplicity. They ditch the keyboard, and replace it with a touchscreen. The display is color. The device is a bit smaller, which makes reading it on public transit a little easier. Back and forward buttons are on each side, and they mimic the mechanical functions of a real book. I can't wait to kick the nook's tires.

Lastly, I posted today about jwz (aka one of the core founders and coders of Mozilla, the precursor to Firefox) ditching the Pre for the iPhone, then Steven Frank (co-founder of Panic, one of the best Mac software companies) writing an exceptionally thoughtful response in re: his tribulations.

I'm not terribly surprised at jwz's frustrations about the Pre. From what I've heard, it's quite a fast device in its initial state, but when you load data and programs into it, it begins to slow down with simple tasks. I'd venture an educated guess that the Pre's initial state was demoed the most aggressively to the quality assurance and executive teams. (Certainly it was demoed that way to the media.) But Pre-bashing is a hell of a lot less interesting than Steven's comments:

The iPhone/iPod Touch, being available for both Mac and Windows, has a single source of software in the app store. That Mac AND Windows thing is key. The app store is not just a software market for Mac users. This is why it blows the minds of indie Mac developers like myself. It’s because it follows the rules of the general software market, not just the Mac software microcosm that we Mac indies enjoy.



Specifically, you have a large group of people who will download and suffer any old shit by the bucketload as long as it is free or extremely cheap. And you have 10% of people who are actually particular about software quality and are willing to pay for it.



In other words, you have the Windows market, and the Mac market, but within the app store itself. And you’d better be damn sure which one you’re targeting, and set pricing and development schedule accordingly.

This makes a lot of sense for certain examples in the App Store: why some superior and beautiful apps have floundered when stacked against discounted apps of inferior quality. But there are others that have bucked this trend: tiny masterpieces of interaction design that just totally kill it in sales. I don't know if there are enough data points to tell yet, whether people are gravitating towards good design. And I also don't know if the iPhone excludes many people from the "Windows market" by default, simply by being an iPhone: after all, aren't most iPhone owners favoring good interactions by getting a device that, as jwz says, "just fucking works?" And aren't other well-designed devices, like the Wii and Flip Video, demolishing sales and crossing new demographic borders? Most importantly, though: is it worth separating people into groups of Windows users and Mac users in the first place?

(And re: Blue Bottle, I went there twice, and - at the behest of many of you - Ritual once. I was ridiculously wired for most of the trip. I can't believe some of the mad science that goes into pouring hot water over ground-up beans.)
Next: usability testing.