I ran my Roomba today and I actually ran it twice because I had forgotten and haven’t done it in a while. And after emptying that been a couple times, I now feel like the grossest of human beings.

I just imagine it going back to its little docking station. And as it pulls in, it just lets how the sign says like, Hello designers and designer rats, you are listening to the drunken UX podcast. This is episode number

one title, not the other one. When I copy. I’ve, it’s you know what it this is what we call a good problem to have right that we’ve done enough episodes, and it’s starting to get confusing as to which number we’re on if we don’t check. So. I’m, I’m all right with that. So let’s see. How are you? I’m doing well. I’m one of the hosts of the show. If you haven’t heard us before, your this is your first time listening to us. My name is

.

Aaron’s presence, he is a light of our life. And I he sits in this room I get to watch him in these in these chats. And I can see all of his kids pictures hanging up behind them. And

And wait, wait, what?

I’ve that I’ve only got one thing on my wall back behind me. And you’d commented on this before because you’ve seen it in the background, but you never knew what it was. I don’t have a kid so I don’t have drawings or anything. But I do have a Judas Priest record. That is right. Add wings of destiny. And so that’s framed up.

I have an accent wall. Yeah, so, folks, Episode Number 35 of the drunken UX podcast is brought to you by our friends over at New cloud. They do interactive maps, illustrations, they have a whole platform that can embed stuff on your site. Go check them out if you’re looking for anything interactive map related for whether it’s a school City Hospital. Sure they can do a theme park or your backyard if you really wanted to. Really big haunted house. Really big haunted house? Sure. There’s one up in Kansas City that’s like two haunted houses side by side. Apparently, it’s like supposed to be one of the best ones in the country. I don’t know. I’ve been there right at one point.

Yeah, hopefully. And that’s the one you go into. And like you don’t get to come out of unless you sign a release and all this and

So if you want to check us out, go by either Instagram at drunken UX podcast. Or you can catch us on twitter or facebook at slash drunken UX. If you want to chat with us, at some point, feel free to drop into slack at drunken ux.com slash slack. And that’ll get your right in. And we would love this and have a chat with you at any point.

I don’t know how far in she is yet so maybe a few hours. So let’s see. I just want to before we get into everything else, I did want to give a shout out to one of our listeners, Mike Henderson. We always say you know if we get something wrong to let us know. And Mike, send us a message on Twitter and we were talking about accessibility in color palettes with Gutenberg and I made the comment that they didn’t have a contrast checking on the color palette selector re up that is in fact not true and hasn’t been referred quite a while as it turns out. Oh no, I am just dumb on that and that’s all that stuff. So shout out to Mike for calling us out on that I did want to issue a public statement because I don’t want to I don’t want the folks at WordPress to be angry at us and all that because I didn’t want to misrepresent them so they do if you go in and I and play with their color palettes and I was looking at it and it does pop up a thing that if you select two colors will warn you that it has potential contrast issues. So that cool is in fact a solved problem on that front.

done WordPress. Whether he liked Gutenberg or not, they did that part. What are you drinking?

It’s not bad. I used to love Stoli. I do I mean, I don’t not like Stoli, but I definitely when they started putting out like all the flavors. That was kind of one of those moments. It was like yeah, that’s for sure.

see Grey Goose cherry, you know,

don’t sit it’s the flavored stuff is all always ends up coming out really sugary.

I can see that and that’s probably fair. I’m old enough now that it’s like, I don’t do much flavored. When and like a The one thing I’ll have is, and I’ve had it on the show, of course is the gingerbread which has fireball in it. And it’s like I voted I’m not going to shoot fireball or something. That’s just that’s humiliating, let’s just be a bit and it does. It’s it. There’s so much sugar in it that it just yeah, is that good, but as like a component to something, I can see it and same with the flavored vodkas. Like if you just want something sweet and flavored, then go for it. But I’m past the age of shooting any of that. That’s for darn sure. What do you got? I’m over here with my bow more 12. I’ve said many times, I’m not a big fan of Iowa scotches. But Bowmore is not bad. It’s still strong, and I took a sip of it to get started here and it definitely it still has a good little socket. But it’s it’s still generous in its flavor. Like it’s not overpowering. And it’s definitely not like I love frog and Ardbeg that have just this really like it doesn’t it doesn’t have that iodine flavor that comes from the peat. It’s it’s got a smoky flavor that stands kind of apart and on its own.

That’s that is I patented by I don’t know what it’s talking about.

I can’t say anything more than that. That’s what makes it fun. That’s why I hope you speak drunk humans, though, I want to talk for a second. This is just totally weird and random. And it came up in my one of my dev chats today. This Instagram post is going around. And I don’t know if folks have seen it. And if you if you haven’t, I’m going to have it linked in the show notes on the website. So stop by drunken ux.com. And you’ll be able to see this. It’s a chimp. And so there’s there’s this chip and they gave the chimp a cell phone with Instagram on it. And the video is absolutely enthralling. Because this chimp is sitting there looking at Instagram, and using Instagram.

And I thought for a minute like, Oh, well this is just you know, somebody has done some good CG us. Yeah, people do that. You know, you’ve seen this on Instagram. But sure. It’s it’s a verified account. It’s not just some random like, I don’t know, the real Tarzan. I don’t know who that is. But it’s probably somebody super famous that I should know. We say it’s Mike whole Boylston Mike Colston, animal education and conservation doesn’t seem like the type of dude who would fake videos. So I want to take it at its word, so that they’ve opened up I don’t know if it’s his feet or somebody it’s clearly a wildlife animal feed. And it starts with this chimp is watching a little video and Instagram video of another monkey with I don’t know if it’s a chimp or what it is I don’t I build websites. I don’t do animal so maybe at a monkey, I don’t know. What are the types in around Bhutan? I don’t. I don’t

That’s a chair. Does it? Yeah. chimpanzee. Yeah, that’s the scientific word. So he’s, but he’s watching it. And yeah, you can tell like he’s, he’s actively. It’s not just like staring at the screen, you know how like, animals will sound like a dog or a cat or something to stare at a TV, but they’re not necessarily watching it.

understood the flow of the app and was making I think the thing that really makes it like super bizarre is you realize that he is making active choices as to which ones he wanted to look at,

and if to make this valuable to the listeners at home, this, whether you like Instagram, or don’t like Instagram, I’m not here to judge. But it really says a lot about the usability of the thing you have made, if you can hand them to an animal, even if it’s a super smart animal. And they can use and understand that interface like that says something you know about about the, the barrier to entry, so to speak. When when my kids were really little, my son

It also reminds me of things like if you’ve seen that video of a champion, a zoo, and a person is sitting in the window with them with a cup and is doing like a real, real simple magic trick. Just a very simple, like, put something under the cup, make it vanish and show that there’s nothing in the car. And the champion, you know, they their ability to establish object permanence is such that when he showed Hey, there’s nothing in the cup. The chimp was like, Ah, that’s Hello. But they understood a thing happened. Yeah, there’s there’s so much to that. I don’t know. It’s, it’s just very, very neat. Go go look at the video if you haven’t seen it yet. Because I do think that it’s an interesting thing. And I guess, good. And you say like kids? Don’t they say, yeah, chimps are basically like a three year old child or something like that, like on a psychologist level. Right?

there’s there’s definitely something to be said there, especially when you think about user interfaces and usability. So the other thing, though, that we want to do just kind of start off and seed in here. Being that it’s the end of April, this is this will be the last episode for the month, all of you by this point. And many of you who are, you know, freelance web developers or anything like that, or have done moonlighting or all this stuff, are probably painfully aware of the process of getting your 1099 together, you know, if you got a Schedule C or something like this and trying to file your taxes online, pro public had an article they put out about Turbo Tax and their use of dark patterns to basically trick you into paying for software that you don’t need. Yeah, this is something I complained about on Twitter actually, very recently, as well. So the timing on this is all very auspicious. From a subject standpoint, I’ll throw some of that in the show notes, too. But the the way in which tax software now approaches its users is bordering on, in my opinion, unethical. Yeah. It makes me sad, as a web developer, to know that there are web developers not pushing back against the things they are doing in those platforms.

And so for, like our web developer friends out there that do a lot of freelancing of any kind, or if you’re self employed in general. And this, this goes back to like our episode with Joel Goodman talking about starting your own web business, you know, if you’re, if you are your own entity, so to speak, and you are filing, if you’ve got even a very small like sole proprietor LLC, you’re probably filing all your income under your 1040, which is perfectly legitimate and appropriate. That one of the things that Turbo Tax was getting called out on is you get to the end of their funnel. And they would say, Oh, you are doing all this stuff about self employed, you need to pay for our hundred and $20 advanced self employment platform instead. And they you know, they get you through the whole process before they tell you any of that. And the reality is that from a legal standpoint, the IRS has an agreement with many of these companies that if you make under $66,000 a year, yeah, you do not have to pay to file your taxes, period, right? No, like, that’s not, there’s no complicated thing about it. That’s just the rule.

I haven’t used to forty.com. Before, I’ll have to check that out. I somebody recommended. I think it’s tax hoc. To me. It was one I’ve used Tax Act since the early 2000s. But even they have fallen prey to this use of dark patterns in and like, it cost me over $70 to file all my taxes this year after paying the fees filing fee, the state file if you know, I don’t fall under that that free filing limit. But they so yeah, there is a link that’ll be in the show notes to the Free File listing from the IRS. That gives you a list of all the services that will let you file for free and the deal. It’s weird, though, because that list also includes a lot of very strange exceptions. Some of them are just like, yeah, if you make under $66,000, you file for free. Here’s how. But then others have different limits and different conditions. And I don’t know, yeah, legally, why that is the case, because it was part of a settlement kind of thing that they put together with the with the tax prep people.

Let’s go though, because here’s the thing with the with the dark patterns, some of the stuff that not just Tax Act, but all you know all these words, h&r block, Turbo Tax, all these folks were doing. One is the way they were doing their SEO and keyword bidding. So if you tried to do a search for something like IRS file free, or file free taxes or something like that, you would get results, of course, but like the top four or five results would be one of those Google Ad panels. And they would all link you into their funnel. That would not give you free taxes. Or free filing rather.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so there’s in the pro publica article, there’s this comment that it turns out, if you start the the process from Turbo Tax com, it’s impossible to find the truly free version. And the company itself admits this. What they did was they went in and looked and they they were actually looking at like the cookies and the local storage stuff that was getting set. And they found the value that was getting set that literally defined you regardless of how you started your taxes. If you started on Turbo Tax. com, it flagged you as a non free filer. And so even if you click the button that says I’m going to file my taxes for free, you are it’s it’s a carnival game. That’s what it is, right? It’s a total Carnival game that they are dangling a prize in front of you that you can never really win.

Yeah. And which and try to go through their checkout process as a consequence. Yeah, they they’ve done stuff like the naming the nomenclature of this. I mean, on one hand, it’s like, it’s brilliant. But it’s also insidious, because oh, yeah, the name if you go to Turbo Tax, they have a product called free edition. Oh, Aaron, what would you expect to the free edition to be? Let me just quickly, just throw it out there. I mean, what do you think the free edition implies?

of course it is. But again, it’s it’s like any weirdly Good deal. It’s like if you are not absolutely meeting every checkbox on a 12 point lyst you don’t qualify and most people don’t. Because the free edition is not the free edition as defined by the IRS. Their version of that is called the freedom edition.

Lee misnamed the products in such a way that the way you would search for it the way you would look for that information and the nomenclature the user uses is being actively used against them in in the platform and on the website.

that’s, I said to start. It’s unethical, at the very least in my opinion. I

at all reminds me and it doesn’t I mean, like I said, I don’t use Turbo Tax, I use Tax Act, but I still see the same stuff. It all comes down to this fear very, anybody who’s ever used GoDaddy, which at some point we do, I don’t know why that’s a weird rite of passage. But at some point, we’ve all had to deal with GoDaddy, but the their approach to up selling, and trying to trick you into paying for things like, you know, if you want a Privacy Guard on your DNS registration, yeah, you know, what does that cost? Like? 10 bucks, 12 bucks a year or something extra? Oh, my gosh, really, I don’t I don’t know how much it may not be. And I may be wrong on that. And don’t don’t take that as what they charge they charge extra for Privacy Guard a little doesn’t. That’s literally part of what you’re paying for. Like it’s just free. It never used to cost any money. I remember, I used to register domains through dream host and like, you know, the privates, the who is privacy. And optimization was always part of it. I was just a recent thing when they made it feel like a Yeah, I mean, I may have that wrong, it may be much cheaper than that. But the fact of the matter is, they try to upsell you on it. Yeah. Which is not great what what the text software does, and like it and what I saw in Tax Act, they’re like, hey, let us run these reports for you. And you know, will will do this planning will will offer you these planning services for your next year. And that gives that as an extra service they want to charge you for, if you have to attach extra forms, that’s where they start funding you into all of these other versions of their product. Adding on states or anything is always extra, that my favorite one is the audit protection. And they’re like here, yeah, as extra and will give you audit protection, and I just want to look at them and be like, what are you the fucking mob?

and I think, you know, in certain circumstances, I’m sure it’s well worth it. And if you if you’re paying for tax preparation, you probably should pay for that or have it, you know, as part of the package, I would argue if you feel like you need that level of protection, you probably should go to an X, you should do an account, you should actually go to a tax accountant and have them do it for you. Because most of the time, they do include that protection as part of what you’re paying. Yeah.

separately, and the thing comes down to like when you get to these pages, it’s always in the final steps. It’s always in like the, I’m ready to eat file, points point. And it’s always a case of like, a big button to continue quote, unquote, or the little text link that says, No, thanks, I wave protect, right. And so it’s like, they’re all they’re doing all of these little things, try and trick you there. They keep stopping you. That’s the other part is they keep interrupting your experience, and trying through fatigue to convince you to click a certain button, or take a certain action that will result in you paying them more money.

no capacity to do audits anymore. And it means they only go after people who’s got like they have income deviations that are like off the charts kind of stuff.

I mean, it all comes down. I know this, this is kind of a Randy way to start the show. And I apologize to the listeners for that. But it is something that I think reflects an ethical obligation as web developers. And it’s I’ve talked about this before. And I think it really shows up in cases like this when dark patterns come into play, especially in a service that everybody has to use. And even though Yes, you can absolutely file by paper. Most people don’t want to do that. Because it is a lot of it’s a pain in the ass a lot of extra work.

here’s the real crux of this situation is that all of these companies h&r block, Turbo Tax Tax Act into it, take your pick, all of them have a vested interest in ensuring that you think it is too complicated to do your taxes yourself. Yeah, and that you can’t trust yourself to accomplish that math. They have a vested financial monetary interest in making you feel that. And you have to resist that whether it’s in their commercials in the calls to action on their website, whatever that case may be. Trust yourself more than them in those situations.

I promised I wasn’t going to go like political on this point. But it is political. But it comes back to this idea that these companies that they’re part of the reason our tax code is so complicated, because again, they have a vested interest in that they can afford to make sure that they have ways to work out that math. And the more complicated it is in the systems it takes to figure it all out, the better off they are because they know that they convince people that they can’t handle it on their own. And they, they have to create that dependency, otherwise, the model doesn’t work.

that’s really important for folks who do any kind of freelancing. And while this may, you know the the idea of dark patterns is one thing, but the idea of just tax issues in general is another. Yeah, I do think that’s really important for people who do a lot of freelance web development to think about because I’ve had years where I’ve done like, consulting contracts on the side. And I mean, it’s, we’re talking like five figures worth of of consulting work that, that adds up. And if you don’t pay the court and the quarterly tax thing, like they you can complain about like education and all that all you want to about, well, they don’t teach you how to do taxes. And yeah, one of the things that you really don’t learn about until you’ve sat down and talk to other people is that the axes, that’s something that until you realize it’s a thing, it’s not something that just comes up, you know. So they’re the endpoint of this before. And we’re going to, I swear, we’re getting into our real topic. This idea of ethics in web development. And I, the thing I said on Twitter the other day was this idea of, I feel like as an industry, we, we almost need a Hippocratic Oath as web developers. Because we have nothing else that keeps us in check when it comes to marketing and business decisions affecting the things that we build. And this idea that I’m going to build, the thing that I’m being paid to built, because they’re being paid to build is a very damaging mentality to take on because it’s very turnkey, and it makes you not think about the consequences. And at the end of the day, web developers are literally the last line of defense between the thing people, you know, the business thing people want to build. And the thing that is right for users.

because I don’t, I don’t want to call out developers and the folks who have built these systems and things like that, but at the end of the day, you did build it. And you know, it’s it’s the Oppenheimer quote, right. And now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds, like, he understood the consequence of building the bomb, so to speak, like that was a that was a big deal. And it the impact of that was not lost on him. And I think as web developers, while Yeah, we’re not building nuclear weapons to you know, wipe out cities. And that’s, boy, this this metaphors going weird. But we do I think we do have that ethical obligation to consider the things we are building, how it impacts people and how it impacts business. That’s all Yeah, man. Dude, can we change the subject?

Yeah, cuz it’s all about government?

depended on the previous talk on the hacks editor and what they were doing. We’re changing. We’re full small. Yeah.

the stuff I have so far. And with the folks I’ve talked to their and all this, like, I have nothing but good things to say about the folks who have done work at the USGS. That’s the United States digital services. It’s a department of the federal government. Now, they work kind of like, it’s kind of the Peace Corps, sort of like, people go there and like work, since basically like a year, they’ll they’ll work a year on contract or something like that. And they’ll go and they put teams together, and they send these teams out to places like the VA or something like that. And

we’re going to help you with your website, we’re going to fix it. And these are folks that are genuinely good at what they do. These aren’t like, you know, the way we have thought about web development. From a government standpoint, like it’s frequently not good. I hate to say that, but I mean, there is this idea that right, the people who it’s kind of that the people can’t do teach mentality, you know, the people who can’t really do web development end up in government of web development jobs, which is not fair. But it was for a while.

yeah, party conduct. And the front end versus the back end, there is I think, an important Unknown Speaker engine.

So last episode, we were talking about this idea of how web components can help you build a design system and the value that they added there. In in 2015, USPS stepped up and said, Hey, government websites are bad. They aren’t working well. They aren’t fulfilling the contracts with the users from a usability standpoint, let us help. And so they came out with the first version of their design system. And at that point in time, it was very much like a foundation or bootstrap kind of system. They Yes, pattern library, they had a few different philosophical points mixed in and things like that. They brought in some ideas like accessibility and how that works in and how to, you know, make that part of your process. And they tried to put together this package. And at that point, even, it was good. Like, it was for its time

it was, it was entirely usable. It was open source on GitHub. So if anybody wanted to go play with it, or adjusted or help with it, they could certainly do that. That’s actually something that I’ve kind of been interested in, but I need more hours in my day. Like, I think it’d be cool to go in and sit down with with that repo and look at it. And they do public calls, where you can sit in and listen to what they’re working on. So yeah, this last in the last couple weeks, they announced that the two point O has finally gone gold for them. Yeah, it has included, I’m just going to read the list here. It has incremental adoption. So you can basically bring it into a project and use the pieces you need. Very, again, very much like a foundation. If you use MPM or something to build a foundation project, you can import it and then turn on just the parts that you want. they’ve introduced it at practical design tokens, function functions and mix ins, again, trying to focus on this the small bits and just what you need. Accessible colors this them were where we heard that before. expressive feeling, which is an attachment to this idea of they don’t want to break up or disrupt the existing layout and templates of sites that exists currently. And so they have built in these, these catches and hooks so that you can bring in existing stuff very easily.

Utility classes, that’s something we’ve seen many places, they’ve gone to a 12 columns, simplified layout grid, feelings about grids, but that’s a topic for another time.

had a lot of martinis that night.

You know what I think one of the big ones there that be consistent, not static? Yeah, that’s, it doesn’t feel like much when you say it. But when you think about it from a how you do work standpoint, it really starts to mean a lot, I think. Yeah. And this idea of consistency doesn’t mean not changing. Right? Right. You know, as you become more fluent in a language, a foreign language or something like, you’re still you, you’re still using your own vernacular and your own inflection and technique. But you get better you get, you get smarter about how you think do things. And that growth is necessary, you are still consistently you, but you haven’t stayed static, you haven’t stayed in that sort of very base level of thinking about the language. I think that’s how that translates into a design system.

Up? Wait, I’m gonna I’m going to skip because there actually is one after that. But I don’t have any bullet points after that one. That’s the it’s a stable foundation that is built to help grow, which Yeah, sure. It is, of course, everything is. So the one though, and this is silly, but it’s it’s also fun. They have introduced the public sands type face, public, public sands, public sands. So you know, we’ve got open sands, we’ve got all of these different open license, sensor thoughts. And they came out and said, you know, what we’re going to do our own to, I’m going to link it, there’s an article in the show notes from vice of all places, but they they wrote up some details on the spot. And it’s it’s very, it’s an interesting idea. It does make sense from the standpoint of them trying to express their own sort of standard, and they wanted a typeface that would reflect the scalability that they wanted across all of their governmental properties, which is vast, right? We’ll talk about that in a minute.

It goes back to that idea, right of the folks who are working at USPS. They’re on their game like these, just random guys that got hired and decided to, like these are folks who are are looking towards they still have 30 years of career ahead of them in many cases. Oh, yeah. They’re young, they’re, they’re engaged, they’re enthusiastic, and they care about the way work is done. Hmm. There. The one thing I don’t get, I’m going to read this quote, because I

my response to this type face was probably what a lot of folks will look at. And it’s like, just Why, what’s the point in having your own type face when there are so many out there, there was a quote from them. And this is quoted in this vice article. It says, during the US web design system two point O development process, it became clear that this typeface could be a useful target for our font normalization feature the GSA spokesperson explained, since other faces are normalized to the optical size of public Sans and common system fonts of us w DS two point O, using public Sams in our design file ensures that when designs go into production, the balance of the type hierarchy remains similar, even if the chosen font eventually changes. In other words, public sands is somewhat of an internal test case for w R Us web. Two point O is ability to adapt whatever typeface a designer may wish to use into the visual language of the rest of the US WGS framework.

like I get that you know, thought scale differently and things like that. And I think that’s kind of what it’s dealing with. But at the same time, I really don’t understand that when you start talking about using whatever font the designer wants to use, well, if other fonts scale differently, because yeah, you know where their baseline is, because I’ve let me tell you, I’ve got some thoughts that I have a real love hate relationship. It’s just a hate hate relationship with and how they play in practice. I don’t I don’t fully understand that as the explanation for why they did their own typeface.

Nothing wrong with Helvetica?

Yeah, yeah. There’s a couple of things with dealing with thought that was very interesting to me as part of this. One was their introduction of type scale. So with type scale, and if you’ve used other other CSS frameworks, and we’d like we’ve got this baked into ours as kind of a convention that we did ourselves. But, you know, it’s basically this idea of having like, size, small size, medium size, large size extra large, and you set like, not breakpoints, but like stopping points for each of those. Right, they’ve introduced a scale system that has 20 steps in it. So you can dynamically if you use their design system, you can go in and say each stop, you know, at large, I want my scale to be eight, at you know, double x large, I want it to be 16. And small, I want it to be four. And so you can use that scale as a means of controlling the way it sizes, abstractly. Hmm, the other part of hat that I found at my initial reaction, and I really hope and before, before we say what it is, let’s let’s call back to our episode with Tatiana Mac, where she said

I get it. I am getting old. I understand. When I said this, and to his credit, Aaron had the same reaction I did and I hope the route font size in US WGS is 10 pixels.

But after I had my initial reaction was what? And then it almost instantly made sense, right? Because now, every ram calculation you do and your CSS is based on a 10 x multiplier. So you need 16 point font, your RAM calculation is 1.6. If you need to write d3 pixel font, your RAM is 5.3. It’s actually kind of brilliant. And I’m really disappointed that it has never occurred to me to do that. Because so many of us we always, like take foundation of us Foundation, I believe it’s based on is 14 pixels. Right? It may be 16. Now, but I think it’s still 14. So sorry, if I’m wrong on that point is the same. If you need a 27 pixel font, what’s the ram calculation on that off the top of your head? From 4814? To what if your basis 14 and you need 27? What’s the ram calculation off the top? Oh, come on.

That’s the kind of things we get handed by designers. Sometimes you open up your envisions get or your envision do your sketch, or x d or whatever the case may be. And you get these specs that are like Wait, what font did you use?

it’s a weird number. It’s not something you can just rattle off.

if your basis 10 and you need 27 the calculation is 2.7. It’s Yeah, it kind of brilliant. I sort of love it.

This is the the two Americans that room here realizing importance of the metric system, right. So to everybody who listens to us overseas, we get it we understand. It really it is it’s it’s a very intuitive thing. And honestly, the next time it comes up, I’m going to advocate for a 10 pixel base spot. And yeah, and then use that as the ram calculation on everything. Because man, talk about making it easy like, and I don’t know if you do that, Aaron, but when I look at when I’m working on a SAS file, and I’m trying to calculate a particular font size, I always do the comment out to the side that is like, you know, right. This is 1.125 Ram, and it’s meant to be 18 pixels.

Yeah. Because you need that reference for other people and everything but right. Yeah, I mean, this eliminates it. It’s it’s silly. It’s such a weird, like, small thing. But man that attention to detail. Yeah, absolutely speaks volumes to the folks who have been this and and my hats off to them. Because I don’t think I’ve ever read an article from Chris coy or Ethan Marcotte or any of these folks that have advocated for a 10 pixel based font. And, and just by that way, and if they’ve written that, and I missed it, I apologize. Don’t scream at me. But

good thought to I let’s just say that, because we didn’t mention that the fight is a perfectly good font.

So okay, let’s see here. It’s worth noting that this isn’t like a little niche product that isn’t being used anywhere. The digital services have worked hard to roll this out within the federal government of the United States. They’ve now got it on, like 200 websites, which I mean, the federal government has, I think a lot more websites than people realize, Oh, my gosh, yes. But yeah, and we’ll have a link in the show notes, they have a list actually, on their documentation of every place, they have rolled it out. And it’s everything from the White House uses it, the VA uses it. It’s deployed on parts of health.gov. All of these different departments of agriculture, and folks like that have it as well as lots of like fringe sites and small services and things and one offs that get produced now all start with that as the base layer. And I even remember Aaron talking to you a few months back about this. And and you were real excited about the idea of like, trying to introduce this because you were Yeah, you were a government contractor. And so it was like this idea of, hey, let’s look at bringing this into our work since it’s already kind of a government standard.

And based on the two point O rollout, part of what they’re emphasizing is, it’s easy to adapt to. So it’s not a matter of bringing it in and changing your whole website, it’s a matter of bringing it in and accommodating the website and adapting it over time to the new features, which makes it a good starting point and a good a good starting point for anybody trying to build a website at that point, or update a website. You know, if you go from using, you know, your own code to something like bootstrap or foundation, you frequently find yourself having to rewrite your entire website. And they have tried. There’s, there’s gonna be a video actually, in the show notes of this where they it’s a video from a couple months ago when they were still beta testing this, but they talk a lot about, you know, this ability to say scope, the CSS, and do things that limit its ability to leak into your existing design so that you only use the parts of it you want. Yeah. And they were they were very cognizant of that. And again, back to this credit, like, this was built by people who get it, they understand these challenges that we have as boots on the ground.

So this idea of design systems certainly isn’t new and not new in government even. And you had mentioned to me a presidential candidate for this year. And he has a fun yeah, that’s all I remember.

I do remember it’s the marketing campaign. But it’s

edge? Or is it but edge because boot? I’ll tell you, the marketing thing literally says but edge edge. I just I mean,

i don’t buy me a T shirt. And I’ll wear it. That’s all

and to be clear, like, this is in Fast Company. It’s not just like some random Slashdot article or something like that, like, their what they did made fastcompany. And so we’ll have a link to that as well in the show notes. So check that out. Because it’s, it’s neat, to say the least.

yeah. So I don’t

it I think it definitely qualifies. And this goes back a fairly long way. In terms of, you know, web technology. Certainly. This goes back to the original Obama campaign in 2008, Scott Thomas put out his book designing Obama, where they went into like, everybody remembers that Oh, logo. But the design concept that they had for the campaign overall, was certainly much bigger than that. The books like 338 pages, it’s, it is a comprehensive look at the way they approached design and branding for that campaign, not just online, of course, you know, covered the spectrum. But that was maybe one of the first really big political sort of like, Hey, we’re actually putting thought into this marketing camp. Like, let me ask you, name, name. One thing associated with George W. Bush. from a marketing standpoint, Logo Logo Design colors, aside from a red, white and blue. w. w. w. Yeah. Yeah. What What was the what was the anchor of this campaign? Yeah, I challenge anybody to tell because I honestly, I don’t remember anything about his campaign. And I’m old enough to remember so. But Obama came out with this idea of hope, right? Yeah. That the hope branding and the Oh, and the way that just the colors that were used, but the specific color blue, that that sort of mix between a powder and a royal blue that he used,

There was a specific texture that they used in some of the backgrounds, and things like that. And so this, this book goes into that, but it was this first real dive into this idea of using a design system, what what Buddha judges doing, Buddha judge, I’m going to say it both ways now. You know, they have released their design system as a utility effectively, and said, Here it here are the colors that define us. You know, here are the ways we present our brand. And here’s a toolset you can use to show your support for us. So that anybody can create a a logo for his campaign. And to an extent,

It was a style guide. Yeah,

it that this kind of overlaps with the broader scheme of what a design system is. And, and what Pete has done is a very good interpretation of a design system, which is producing a means of not just enforcing your branding, but producing things based on it, then are inherently in compliance with that branding. Right. So it gets into what we talked about, for what a design system is designed systems are a confluence of the philosophy and values that drive you as an organization, which, like you, you quoted from the WD s, they’ve got six design philosophies that anchor what they built, the styles that go along with that styles are an abstract expression of the colors, you know, the branding, the voice, the things that define you culturally, and then the patterns, the patterns are the implementation of those things, you know, they are the strict well, and and so the, the one thing that us WGS two point O said, we’re releasing practical design tokens. They use rat race tokens. tokens are that sort of abstraction and application of patterns. And so we’ll I’ll throw a link in the show notes to the design principles as well, because I think those translate all that really well. But that’s really what we get to because at the end of the day, design systems help developers, they help designers. Absolutely. But what they really help are the people who bring you the things to design and to develop,

the things you’re gonna have to build.

Yeah. So what this is all designed to do is get you to the point as a developer or designer that you can deal with the ad hoc work that comes your way. One of the things that you know, I’ve had a problem with for the last god 15 years is stuff coming to me that styles are easy stuff, a style guide is actually very simple. And a lot of kids let’s take Satan Pepsi, the Pepsi style guide is very simple. The Pepsi font is extremely distinctive, you know that that’s the thing that Pepsi uses that color blue, and the color red they use in their logo is very distinctive, it’s very specific, it’s something that’s going to be expressed through the work. And so if somebody is contracted outside of Pepsi, to help build a landing page, let’s say, it’s very easy to tell them use this font use these colors, you know, here’s our voice, whatever. Where it gets harder is then when that gets handed off to a developer or some designer to refine it, or whatever the case may be, because it starts to impact. And you’ll see this is much, much more in larger organizations. In all fairness, folks who work freelance, you know, I don’t know what to tell you, you can certainly have an internal design system that you use, you can develop design systems for the folks you contract with small organizations don’t care. You know, I mean, for me, for better or worse, they don’t because they’re small. And it’s that’s not the value that they bring. But any kind of larger organization. If you can hand off a design system to that third party,

is kind of a contract into the reliability and confidence of your workflow. Because Yeah, one of the things and this is where things get gnarly is I’ve worked with my company for seven years, it’s a large organization, we have many brands, not just one brand, but the brands are related. And so we run into problems, because each brand is of course, distinct but connected. And so what we’ve been after is this very nice balance of each brand needs a style guide, certainly. But our design principles, our design philosophy are at an organizational level, not at a brand level, right. And our pattern library needs to be at an organizational level, because what we get is, you know, if one part of our company goes out and contracts with a third party to bring in a design for a landing page or something, and they come in with, let’s say, a 5050 panel that has an image on one side and content on the right side or something like that. I mean, we internally have already developed some solutions to that. But if that other group doesn’t know that, and we don’t have any, like defined value, organizational value attached to that layout, they give us something else, now we’re stuck maintaining to different 5050 panels that are maybe close Yeah, not quite, the padding is a little different, the treatment of the image is a little different. And it results in an enormous amount of overhead, to then maintain things that are effectively the same. That’s one thing that when you bring in a design system, you can start to eliminate because when you contract with somebody, the first thing you do is you say, here is our system, it’s like walking into a kid, and pouring a bucket of Lego blocks in their lap. There may be 1000, Lego blocks in that in that bucket, but you know that the thing they build out of it is something that you can reproduce every time without going out to the to Walmart and buying more Legos. Right. Right. That’s the value of the design, at least to me, that’s the value that I see in it. It reminds me

Yeah, because you want to reduce work at the tail end. And this is always that risk. And I’m I’m going through that right now. I’m working on a project where what was designed was designed entirely in a vacuum. It didn’t take into consideration the technology being used the CMS, it had it didn’t take any of that into account. And yes, I can solve every problem that is presented in that design. But the difficulty associated with something like how the menu is presented, and this is one that a lot how I responsive menu is based on a mobile design versus a desktop design. Right and mobile design was such that I couldn’t use the markup that was generated because the system, it’s WordPress, I don’t know why I’m being cagey about it. WordPress is menu output has a very specific structure to it. And it’s a very flexible and useful structure. But I couldn’t produce the mobile navigation without either creating can totally different menu, or by adding on an enormous amount of extra JavaScript to completely rewrite the DOM to account for it. That’s where these things like design systems come in. Because you can account for all of that well ahead of time. You can adapt, you can know that these problems are there. And it silently kind of enforces a rule set upon the people who will then pick that up and use it, they don’t need to care what CMS you’re using, or what output it has. All they know is this is, you know, when I look at your design system, I can look at the pattern component that and know this is the way menus or output or right I can look at your accessibility standards and know that if I give you yellow text on a white background, that that is not something that you’re going to find acceptable, you know, those are the things that we strive for when we bring all of this together gather because I think that in the end, it makes everybody better, doesn’t it? I mean, even the most developer is developers amongst us, you may never touch CSS, you may have one have nothing to do with it. But at least understanding the values that your company has. that directs the way that you build the thing that is coming next.

And there’s another big piece to design systems, something that has been argued, my God, I’ve been going to conferences, as long as I’ve been a professional in this industry, and it’s been a topic, website redesigns. I almost got him, I almost got it. Oh, they are a waste of time and money. website redesigns are the ultimate admission of failure, from a strategy

But if they become necessary, it is still out of failure. The only time that is not true is if your company has been bought by another company and you are forced to literally change the entire identity of your brand.

and one thing like we have tried to do over the last few years to insulate us from that is we have worked very hard to kind of almost develop an adversary against our CMS, which is to say, like, we went out of our way to make sure every drop of code is in GitHub is as as part of a build process that goes through Jenkins and all this stuff, and then gets deployed through scripts to the CMS so that if the CMS is ever changed, in theory, we could, you know, still work involved. But we could still inherently pick up what we have, and bring it with us. And so but it that’s fair, that is a fair point. The the bigger argument is this idea of in place, you know, just deciding we’re going to redesign stuff because we’re tired of it or whatever. And

always, let’s redesign the homepage. Let’s redesign the templates. Let’s fix this. And it’s a failure. Because in if you do your web development correctly, you should just always be iterating. Yeah, you should always be in a cycle of improvement and measuring and adjusting. And it’s very, it’s, I joke about it. With my co workers, we are an agile shop. But we are of course, like anybody, we are a flavor of agile, we are not purely agile, because nobody is purely agile at this point. But we do try to approach that idea of let’s build something and iterate on it. Let’s make it work. Get it out the door and then measure it and then improve upon it. Let’s not try to be perfect out the gate. And let’s not build it and then wait two years before we touch it again. Yeah, we’re not great at that yet. But we’re, we’re trying.

Yeah, yeah, it’s a you know, it comes back. And let’s let’s tie this all up with a neat little bow because when we go back to last week’s discussion, or last episodes discussion on web components, the idea is a good design system is organic, and is constantly growing and changing with you. So that while from today, to next month, it’s not different. But today, to six months from now, you could see different changes different improved meditation.

You’re right, your design system should be a reflection of the evolution of your users. Because chart, your users will get smarter over time and change over time and their abilities and capabilities will change over time. My God, we’re giving Instagram the chimps talking about putting the perfect bow on this subject, right.

I’ve seen cats play the the ant game on iPhones, you know, where they smash the ants or frogs. You see the ones the frog trying to eat the ants on the screen? They can they have perceptive ability there. So guess that that is clearly the end of this episode. At this point. I don’t think we can end it better than that. So at any rate, look at design systems, go look at what you can do there. And and think about them that way. Because they are designed to be a growth mechanism for your organization, you should be able to evolve them and change them and adapt them.

heard I do not have a clue what the hell you’re talking about.

that reminds me I had a conversation earlier today with some folks from a company that I think this sounds very similar, right, that they are working with a company. It’s a legacy company. So the company has been around for decades. And it’s a large, publicly traded organization. And their consumer system, their their their customer system, their CRM. Yeah, das based on fairness, I’ve talked to folks who have had like Fortran based systems that are still out there. Or if anybody’s ever used info basic, I know a place where that is still in use. They bet this dossier system that they have to run emulated. Because not only is the company that built it out of business, but the companies that came in to support it after the factor out of business. And so they’re stuck trying now to figure out how to bridge the gap. Costco is a company that is in this position. Actually, Costco is like commentary management system is all command line das based. It may not be Doss specifically, but it is command line of some flavor. But But I can see immediately where you’re going with that that idea of Yeah, let’s apply the design system to the development side so that we know why technology decisions were made and things like that. That’s

So my my direction to Aaron this week is going to be to go figure out who the key contributor is to that repo. And we’re gonna get him on the show. That’s my goal. By the end of the year, we’re going to get that person on because

Now, that’s very interesting. And it’s something that just goes to show that we we’d speak a little off the cuff here, that didn’t come up in our, our free plan. So that’s very cool. Folks, stick with us. We’re gonna go to a break for just real quick, give me a little commercial do that thing. Then we’re gonna come back and we’re going to wrap up and holy hell I don’t know. The drunken UX podcast is brought to you by our friends at New cloud. New cloud is an industry leading interactive map provider who has been building location based solutions for organizations for a decade. Are you trying to find a simple solution to provide your users with an interactive map of your school, city or business? Well, new clouds interactive map platform gives you the power to make and edit a custom interactive map in just minutes. They have a team of professional cartographers who specialize in map illustrations of many different styles, and are ready to design and artistic rendering to fit your exact needs. One map serves all of your users devices with responsive maps that are designed to scale and blend in seamlessly with your existing website. To request a demonstration, or to view their portfolio, visit them online at New cloud.com slash drunken UX that’s in you cloud.com slash drunken UX. Everybody, thanks for joining us this week on the drunken UX podcast. Hey, if you have a topic that you’d like to hear us cover at some point, feel free to drop by the website, drinking UX calm, click the Contact link in the main navigation. And you can submit the form there. And if you want to hear us talk about something that’s important to you, let us know. I’d love to hear what you want to hear us drink scotch and vodka. Whatever else may be. I don’t know. Hey, Aaron, save me. Yes.

and more fortunately, I’m having to commit more time to that it’s a blessing and a curse

all the places we are a popular bunch of people. And we love talking mostly because we love hearing the sound of our own voice. I mean, I do anyway, folks. Genuinely thanks for tuning in this week. If you have anything you want to hear coming up, we’ve got a bunch of stuff coming up that you’re going to want to tune in for from book reviews to interviews to guests and other topics. I promise you, it’ll be worth your time. Otherwise, I think I only have one thing left to say and that’s before me gets here. I guess just keep your personas close and closer. Later.