I’m home and (sort of) recovered from Automattic‘s Grand Meetup (#a8cgm), so back to my notes from An Event Apart Austin…
Karen McGrane presented “Content in a Zombie Apocalypse” and dropped some knowledge on us about WYSIWYG and the ridiculousness of web-paper (PDFs).
On WYSIWYG:
“I’m kind of like the President of the WYSIWYG Haters Club.” 
This was an interesting story! — WYSIWYG came from XEROX so that they could sell laser printers.
On Web-Paper aka PDFs:
“The blobiest blob that we have ever blobbed onto the web… the PDF!”
Please, allow me to make one thing clear before I go on: Nobody is reading your PDF. The World Bank recently did a study in which they looked from 2008 to 2012 at all of the PDFs that they have put online and what they found was 33 percent of them, a third of them, never downloaded at all. What’s worse: 40 percent of them were downloaded fewer than 100 times.
Nobody is reading your PDF, because:
- not digital
- not responsive
- not accessible
So why do people use PDFs on websites so much?
They allow someone to use a familiar tool (like Microsoft Word) to produce a complex document and put it on the web. It’s a simpler process than getting the document actually on a site, but definitely means fewer readers (like, sometimes none).
Design systems and content structures are BFFs, they go hand in hand. @karenmcgrane @RainbowliciousD #aeaaus pic.twitter.com/kBYAyuch9h
— Shawn Beatty (@sbeatty) October 5, 2015
She says, “First add content repository, then layer author experience on top of that. Next pattern library, then design styles.”
More Information:
- Article Recommendation: The Language of Modular Design.
- Karen’s got a video, the slides, and a transcript of this talk here.
Note: The Twitter bird icons link to the corresponding tweet for each piece. Thanks to @mor10, @RainbowliciousD, @NickMartinUI, @sbeatty for live-tweeting the talk along with me on #aeaaus. 🙂
Notes on some sessions linked on this page (and more added as I post them).
