Cameron Moll Brian Cameron Moll, interviewed by Jared Spool, recorded on location at Christiansen: the Deconstruct 2007 conference in Brighton, England, September 7th, 2007. [music] Brian: Welcome. I'm Brian Christiansen, producer of the Spoolcast. In today's Spoolcast, Jared sits down with acclaimed designer Cameron Moll. Currently Cameron is the interaction design manager at the LDS Church in Salt Lake City, Utah. He oversees many web properties that face a worldwide audience. Cameron is also well-known within design circles for his blog Authentic Boredom and a leading author and speaker on design issues, CSS and, most recently, mobile web design. If you're interested in learning more from Cameron Moll, be sure to attend the User Interface Conference this November in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now in our twelfth year, the UI Conference allows you four straight days of learning with some of the world's top designers, information architects and usability professionals. Cameron will be presenting a full-day tutorial on designing elegant CSS interfaces and a ninety-minute session on mobile web design. We hope you'll join us. And now, with no further ado, here's Jared. [music] Jared Spool: Welcome everyone. I'm actually right now in Brighton, the UK. We're by the shore. You might actually hear the water in the background. I'm talking here today with Cameron Moll. He's going to be at the User Interface 12 Conference. He is one of my heroes in terms of the world of design. I just was very happy that we could get a chance to sit down and talk. So Cameron, how are you? Cameron Moll: Good. How you doing, Jared? Jared: I'm doing good. So, why don't you tell folks about how you got into this business and what your interests are. Cameron: How I got into the business? Jared: Yeah. You started as a small child, right? Cameron: That's right. [laughter] No, it was the late '90s in fact. I'll spare you all the details, but long story short I didn't access the web until really about '97 or '98. Jared: Really, that late? Cameron: Yeah, can you believe that? My father was selling camping gear on the side at the time. I had heard about this thing called the web, and I said, "Dad, why don't I just throw together a site and let's see what happens with that?" Of course, it looked absolutely hideous. But I archived the thing, and I still have it today to just look back and see where we've come from. Long story short, that went OK. Later that year I did some work for a local club at one of the universities. With those two sites, as horrible as they were, I somehow landed a job at a company back in the dot-com boom. It was really difficult to get a job in spite of my portfolio at the point. From those two projects I got a job, and over the next four years kind of climbed the ranks. I became a creative director. I guess from there my career just started taking off. I think it was mostly the fact that I had found something that I was passionate about, even though I had no idea what it was. If that makes sense. Jared: Oh, absolutely. That passion drove your career. Cameron: Right. The thing is, I never took design classes per se. I was a business marketing major at the time. Jared: I didn't realize that. Cameron: Yeah. I had plans to be a marketing director, VP of Marketing, all these things. At that same time is when I fell into web design. I grew up in woodworking, so building stuff with my hands, creating things. I think when it came time for me to fall into web design, it was a natural fit. Here I was creating stuff with my hands, they just happened to be digital stuff. I think having a marketing degree at the same time was probably a good fit. It's about knowing the customer, right? Web design is largely about the same: understanding who the user is, what makes them tick, and then what makes them click on things. Jared: So your background is, you've actually moved. I think that's similar to a lot of people who will be attending the conference. They found themselves thrust in the web world. One day they are doing other stuff that has nothing to do with anything digital or the web. The next thing you know, they're managing websites, and designing information architectures, and overseeing the visual design of the site. That was your path. Cameron: Yeah. A lot of companies--at least in my experience--that do that have people internal who have been doing something else, right? And then often they find themselves in the middle of this thing called the website, and trying either to design it or to manage it, whatever. I wasn't already in the culture of being in a business per se. I fell into it in the same way, though, as some of those people who find themselves at a large institution, and all of the sudden one day they're working at a website. I got lucky, let's put it that way. I got lucky in that it was something I enjoyed and something I seem to have great passion for. Not everyone, admittedly, is that lucky to be able to fall into it, and have it be something they really enjoy or something they find themselves really good at--being able to execute well in terms of strategy for the web and so on. Jared: What would you say, in the ten years you've been doing this now, is your greatest, the thing you're most proud of in that period? If you only had a couple of minute to show somebody something that really says what that period has been about, what would you point to? Cameron: Oh geez. That's a great question. You know, I've been asked similar questions before, and I don't know if any particular project stands out. For me it's been this evolutionary process of always making the next design more unique, more personal and hopefully a better solution than the previous design. If that makes sense. Jared: So, when you come to the end of a design project, do you have a process you go through--or maybe you're thinking about it throughout the whole project--of "What will we be doing next time?" When you're looking to improve things, at what point do you start thinking, "OK, next time we're going to do this better"? How do you start figuring out what those things you want to do better are? Cameron: Well, I mean, projects tend to ship with stuff that I am not a 100% satisfied with, every project does. Jared: Right, yeah, I mean that is just the reality of the world. Cameron: Right, so I think if, I found that in the moments that I take time to pause and look back and say, "You know what, a project needs to go out the door, maybe at 90% where I hope it would be." Right, but you would love to get it to that 100%, but because of budget, because of time, etcetera, etcetera, it needs to ship. Jared: Right, yeah. Cameron: It needs to get out the door, you have got time, usually, you have got time to fix things later, or hopefully you do. Jared: Yeah, right, yeah, I told you that my Pappy always told me, of course, I never call him my 'Pappy' except when I am saying this. But, my Pappy always told me that at some point you have to shoot the engineers and ship the product. Cameron: Absolutely. Jared: I mean, you cannot just, there is this tendency to just work it until it is done. But, you cannot do that, you have to get it out, it has to be out there. Cameron: Well, I am a big quality freak, but at some point you cross that line where it is kind of like the laws, the law of diminishing returns. It is no longer valuable to keep improving the quality; it is time to ship it. Jared: Right. Cameron: So, in terms of, "How do I look forward?" Or, during a project, look to that next one and say, "How will I improve this next time?" I do not know that I look down the road that way, per se, but more, you know, it is just a matter of hopefully taking time at the end of the project, saying, and saying to myself, "What went well, what did not, what can I work on next time? I am not terribly satisfied with this, but that is OK, I will fix it the next time around, or I do not know, [laughs] hopefully improve it." Jared: What was something, that was part of a recent project, that you look back, you say you definitely want to do that better and how will you do it better? Cameron: Oh, do not ask me that question. [laughter] Cameron: You know why, because I am going to mention Sharepoint. Jared: Oh no. [laughter] Cameron: So, in fact, I wanted to get your presentation on video today, so I could take that back and say, "Look guys, look at what Jarrod said about Sharepoint." Jared: [laughs] Cameron: But, you know, I have been at the LDS Church now for about ten months, and it has been a wonderful experience. But, of course, they have many of the same challenges that just about any large organization has. We have, we do not know exactly how many employees, that do not necessarily give that out. But, we can guess, probably eight to 10,000 employees. And, so there are plenty of people there that need to have a say in things. And, when it came to Sharepoint, for example... Jared: So, you are using Sharepoint for your internal communications? Cameron: The Internet... Jared: The Internet. Cameron: ...essentially, yeah so... Jared: Yeah. Cameron: That was, that did not turn out the way that I had hoped it would turn out, unfortunately. And, it was not necessarily any internal politics that led to that. Part of it was largely, and quite admittedly, due to the fact that Sharepoint was not nearly as customizable as we had hoped it would be. Jared: Yeah, Sharepoint, Microsoft Sharepoint, has this weird customizable aspect to it, which is, some things you can customize to this excessive level of detail, far beyond what anybody would need. Cameron: Right. Jared: And then, other things, which are obvious things that people would want to change, you cannot touch it. Cameron: You know what blew me away? Some of that stuff that we could not touch was compiled code; you had to go all the way down to the root... Jared: Right. Cameron: ...of the, whatever they were producing to customize it, and we hit road blocks along the way. Where we could not customize something as simple as a button, because that button was being generated from compiled code. It just blew me away. But, anyways, long story short, it did not necessarily turn out the way I had hoped it would turn out and that was a challenge, both as someone who is a quality freak, how loves to see beauty and usability coexist and to not be able to have that. You know, that was not a 90%... Jared: Right. Cameron: ...that was well below 90% satisfaction, on my part. And, a lot of it was out of my control. Jared: Right, right. Now Sharepoint has its idiosyncrasies, but every system has its idiosyncrasies... Cameron: Oh, absolutely. Jared: ...had you gone with any other solution, you would have run into other walls. And, as a designer, that has got to be very frustrating to have these, sort of, wacky technology-imposed constraints that just, you know where you want to go, and it is literally like walking through this beautiful path in the garden and then just coming up to this brick wall. Cameron: Mm-hmm. Jared: Just not knowing how to get to the other side of it. Cameron: You know what is so frustrating about that too is, you are absolutely right, it seems to be the case, across the board, that enterprise software, CMSs, and so on, you are always going to run into those road blocks. I do not know that I personally, yet, have found a way to overcome all of those road blocks, but rather, it requires, honestly, a lot of patience and a lot of tolerance for, I dread the fact that the tools are often unusable. Jared: Right. Cameron: That should not be the case. But, we know it is... Jared: Right. Cameron: ...we cannot get around that. So, I think it just requires earnest tolerance and patience to work through that. I have not found a way to get around it yet, to be honest. Jared: Yeah, but I think that it true of, you know, any technology platform. I think it is just, you have to have patience, you have to really learn it. The other thing is getting engaged, I think, with the community of other developers that are working on those platforms. Because, people discover back doors and hacks and tricks and, even in the world of CSS and things a lot of it is those back doors and those hacks and those tricks that allow you to do some of the coolest stuff. Cameron: Right, and you know, the funny thing is, is I was not as concerned with skinning the application, you know, making it our colors and our branding and things like that. But, more improving the user experience. Jared: Right. Cameron: Which, unfortunately, you really cannot do with, not only Sharepoint, but a lot of enterprise systems out there. Jared: No, they sort of dictate this flow. Cameron: Right. Jared: What is getting even worse is that, you know we have a client that is a university, who is running Sharepoint as an Internet, and then they are running SAP for part of their system, they have got Peoplesoft for the Human Resources person, they have Kronos for their timecard system, and they have got Oracle Finance for something else. And, none of these systems were built to be particularly usable by themselves. And then, on top of that, none of them were built to be usable when used in conjunction with something else. So, the average user is bouncing through these different applications, none of which were designed to be with each other. And, trying to create an experience where it is not complete frustration for people to do the simplest things. Cameron: Well, you want to say, "Well, why can't people just get it right? Why can't the enterprise software developers and designers and whomever, just get it right?" But, when you think about a company of, say 10,000 employees, and all the processes that go on within that company. I would not want to take on the task of trying to make an application that would function for every single process within that company. I think that is a pipe dream. Jared: I think it is, I think it is. I think, but then the MIS people are, soft of stuck, the IT Department is stuck, sort of weaving these threads together from this patchwork quilt. Cameron: Right. Jared: And, in essence, they do have the responsibility for creating the experience, for every function, for every job. Cameron: Oh, sure. Jared: And, their options are, to build it themselves, for which it is way too massive to do that. Or to buy components and try to glue them together, but that becomes a hard challenge. It's a hard space right now. Cameron: You know, it is a challenge. It's the old cots versus build, the off-the-shelf versus thing that I think every company faces. Something strange about that is, I find it fascinating because of the challenge, to go into an environment like that. Yeah, maybe we didn't get Sharepoint exactly the way we wanted it. But when you look at the span of an organization, their activities right now, but also hopefully the length of that organization, you've got to remind yourself, "You know what, maybe you did it right this time." You're so passionate and want to make the user experience as good as possible. I hope that I personally never quench that insatiable desire for great user experiences. At the same time, a business needs to run their day to day operations. You try to do as best as you can and hopefully not get in the way. Does that make sense? Jared: So, we are coming to Cambridge in November. Cameron: Absolutely. Jared: What are you going to speak about? You've got a full seminar. Cameron: I do. I'll be speaking about this idea of designing elegant user interfaces, CSS specifically. Really what that means is, how do you put together the beautiful and the usable, as I said before, can they coexist and if so how? For me, ever since I started, that's my passionate. How do I make something both beautiful but usable, elegant. Beauty, elegance, usability, a great user experience and so on. Jared: Now, is there a tension between the two, functional and beautiful? Cameron: I don't think the two themselves create the tension necessarily. I think it's more the persons involved. At least in my experience-- it's a bit different in yours--you typically have those who are passionate about elegance and those who are passionate about usability. Hopefully you have parties that are passionate about both. In my experience at least, the friction comes from those persons wanting to do what's best based on what they know, their expertise in that area. It's not necessarily that beauty and usability can't coexist by themselves if you rule all the people out of the equation. I really think they can. They might come at odds at times, but again I think that friction is created from the persons and not necessarily the disciples. Jared: This is a conversation that I've had a lot. Folks who come through traditional design training typically come for the most part from a visual design background, and often an art school background. Art has a very different sort of notion of functionality. What is functional, what isn't functional and the purpose of functionality. In many ways, I've had people who had come through art schools tell me that when they were in art school, if they actually created a piece of art, a project, that had a function, then they had to remove the function. If they were somehow doing something with a fork, they had to make the fork usable from an eating perspective. Because as long as you could use it to eat, it was not art, from their professors' perspective. I don't know if that's over- exaggerating it. My take on art is that it's about bringing out emotion and feeling out of the artist, but sometimes the artist is what brings out the emotion and feeling of the viewer of the art. For instance, a great film might make you cry, it might just make you feel completely sad and awful, but it would still be a great film. I would be an awesome film if it could just get those emotions out of you, you get completely absorbed by the film. But a great design for an interface shouldn't make you cry. [laughter] Right? So, you're sort of limited. To some extent you have to channel that education of art--you can tell me if you agree with this. Sometimes you have to channel that notion into things that have to do with delight or productivity, or whatever it is the design is shooting for. Cameron: And let me clarify too. When I talk about beauty, I'm not necessarily talking about beauty for the sake of beauty. It's kind of like what you talked about. A great user experience should be invisible. I guess the wrapper in many cases around that experience should also be somewhat invisible. I certainly don't advocate--and in this workshop won't advocate--beauty for the sake of beauty, but rather beauty that really enhances the experience. Maybe beauty isn't the right word. What would be the right word? Jared: I don't know. It's some sort of notion of aesthetic elegance. I think beauty is an OK word, but it's beauty with a purpose to an extent. Cameron: You're right, and it might be more--to me a great user experience can be beautiful, not necessarily in the aesthetic but in the satisfaction that I derive from that experience. Here's kind of a crazy story. When I drop off clothes at the dry cleaner's in town, they are still in a DOS-based system. The interface is all keyboard, it's all DOS. But what I love about their system is that it's so fast. Web interfaces have yet to parallel the speed of a DOS system. Jared: Tell me about it. Cameron: It's incredible, I hand them my stuff and [mimics sound of typing] and I'm gone. On a web interface you're relegated to a mouse or a keyboard. That experience would easily be three to four times as long as the DOS experience. For me that's a beautiful experience. The aesthetics of DOS are nowhere near anything that we might call beautiful aesthetically. David Pogue from the New York Times, the technology reviewer, just a few weeks did a whole story on macros for your PC or your window system. All you have to do is type a few keystrokes and it'll go off and do all these different functions. All he was talking about was the reinvention of the command line. You have to remember all these keystrokes; you have to remember what they all do. There are no visual clues at all as to what they do. You just have to commit them to memory. But once you've committed them to memory, you've got this very speedy process to do it. I think in the move first to window-based stuff and then the web-based stuff, everything got tied up in this mouse around thing. You've got these full keyboards there. It's almost like we're asking jazz musicians to play the piano with one finger. We're not letting them use the full gamut there. And for repetitive tasks or things like that, I mean part of the experience, you are absolutely right - you know, the thing is that the people who run that dry cleaner, they have a great day when every customer walks out of there happy. And customers aren't going to walk out of there happy by watching them mouse around the screen. Jared: Right. Cameron: OK? They are not going to - you know, maybe they won't notice that it goes really fast. But they'll definitely notice if it goes really slowly. And so the experience of being a customer of the dry cleaner is enhanced by having this system that allows them to process the ticket as fast as possible, grab the stuff off the rack, give it to you. You know, you go and look at it and say, "Yeah, this is a great job. I'm going to give you my money." And I'm out of there. And that's what it's about. But if they lose their clothes, if they take forever to do something then it's not going to work. Jared: Well, and you're absolutely right. I mean that's the whole package isn't it, that you've got the great experience that the clerk has taking the order? You got the customer involved who does not see the interface as you are saying, but is the recipient of I guess the clerk's speed. Cameron: Right. And efficiency. You know I think getting back to view for a second and how that plays into everything - I don't want to dwell on this point, but again we'll talk about this in the workshop, this very issue that we deal with. I think if you've had that wonderful user experience, whether it be DOS or website or what have you and on top of that after you fine - hone and fine-tune that to be able to have something that aesthetically is an enjoyable experience that produces loyalty in the customer. That's a win-win situation. Jared: It absolutely is. It absolutely is. I think that's quite the key. Now you have been doing a lot with typography right? Cameron: I wouldn't necessarily say that's been my forte or expertise the last few years, but a little bit. Jared: Do you dabble in it? Cameron: I try to but I'm nowhere near a typographic expert. Jared: Yeah, because I noticed the type that you use on your own site and in your presentations and stuff is gorgeous. Cameron: I think every designer early on in his career gets experience with as many typefaces as he can. Jared: Hmm. Cameron: And what he can produce. You know, kind of like we talked about today, typography versus typeface is the right one. Designers will often experiment early in their career. And usually most designers, as they mature in that career, will settle down with say six to ten typefaces that they really enjoy. I think I'm getting into that stage of my life that I understand what typefaces are out there, what they can or cannot do for me. You know, I've narrowed that down to six or ten typefaces that I know work really well. And that isn't to say necessarily that every client that comes through the door, you know is the nail and I am the hammer. Jared: Right. Cameron: They are going to fit my six to ten typefaces or be gone. But more, they are tried and true, that will work for a variety of clients. And you know when it comes to the Web, we don't have as many options as perhaps we would like. Jared: That's true. Cameron: In terms of typefaces. But at the same time it's still very possible to make beautiful interfaces with even just the typefaces that reside on users' machines. Jared: Yeah I mean, I've seen some beautiful stuff just with you know, Georgia and Verdana and Tacoma. Cameron: Right. What I have talked about before, you know is this idea that it's not necessarily the typeface you choose. It's what you do with it. Jared: Right. Cameron: As long as you can choose a solid typeface, well you can make some wonderful stuff if you know how to use typography well. I think that's what it comes down to. Jared: Right. And one of the examples you used in your presentation today was the Dyson ad. You know, it's a vacuum cleaner ad. Cameron: Right. Jared: And when they were talking about the word 'clog' it had the 'o' completely filled in and the circle on the 'g' completely filled in. It was like completely communicated what a clog meant I mean just in the way that the type had been selected. Cameron: Right. That's what we're talking about, right? It's not necessarily the typefaces that I might love or you might love but rather what you do with those typefaces. Jared: Right. Right. Do you have any projects right now that you are working on that are really sort of jazzing you? And what about them gets you excited? Cameron: Well you know, right now at least down at the church I'm not assigned to any projects per se. I have pulled back from that little bit to be able to turn around and service the 25 or so designers that we have. And so my job largely requires me to understand what these designers are doing on a day-to-day basis and then be able to provide recommendations, guidelines, patterns and so on. You know, I have always been passionate about interfaces that can be flexible - this idea of bulletproofing that we will talk about in the workshop. And techniques that allow a website that may have originally been designed in English to set up a certain content structure that will later at some point be translated into 10 languages, that will be thrown all kinds of content that the designer and developer could never have anticipated in being able to make a site flexible enough to accommodate that from the very start. And so right now my job is really to produce techniques, recommendations, suggestions and so on. In the example of bulletproofing, there are many other things that I might work on. Jared: Right. Cameron: But in that example to be able to supply these designers with recommendations for being able to tackle those issues. And so I think it's appropriate that the workshop will cover roughly the same things because there is a lot of experience, at least that I have in that area. Jared: That's cool. So you are going to be bringing those real-world examples, right, into the workshop? Cameron: Oh, absolutely. And we will probably talk about Share Point and websites like that. So it's only recently in the last few weeks that I have now reassigned myself or been reassigned to tackle all these ideas, these guidelines and recommendations and so on. But I'll certainly bring plenty of actual examples both personally and on the job to share in the workshop. Jared: Sounds good. Cameron, I want to thank you very much. It's going to be great to see you again in just a few weeks in November. And thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Cameron: I'm excited. Thanks Jared. Jared: OK. [music] Brian: We hope you have enjoyed this Spool cast. You can comment on this and other episodes as well as find more UIE podcasts at UIE.com/audio. You can win free admission to our next virtual seminar by filling out a short listener survey about this podcast. Please see the corresponding blog post at UIE.com/brainsparks for the survey link. You can enter once for every podcast you listen to. Don't forget that Cameron Moll will be presenting two sessions at our User Interface Conference this November in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We invite you to find out more at UIE.com/events. That's all for this week. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. [music]