Shawn Cook

So! I quit Facebook at the end of September and I’m now a few days into month three of withdrawal. By “quit”, I mean deactivate, not delete. I’m pretty sure it won’t last, but a break to contemplate my identity can’t hurt.

I suspect that this is just part of my recent move to consolidate a noisy, redundant and sometimes stressful online life. Around the same time, I permanently closed accounts on Reddit, Linkedin, Gawker, Foursquare and others. Thankfully none of this exposed terrifying gaps in my identity.

Facebook, however, is proving to be an indispensable, well-missed tool, a fact which I’ve found both amazing and horrifying.

On one hand, I’m pleased with the peace that my deactivation has brought me. I’m decluttered, free of all news, both good and bad! I continue to exist, minus the background process dedicated to “oh shit, Erin from 8th grade math had a baby and its poop is a weird color”.

On the other hand, my social life has kind of faded away. I’m no longer in the know. I’m irrelevant. I miss events because I was never invited. I can’t even stalk! I’ve been tempted to sign in and browse as Paul, which completely sidesteps the benefits of deleting my own account.

Let me describe the reasons I quit:

1. Too much noise, too much signal. No matter how many times you check Facebook, the pile of interesting stuff it provides to you never, ever shrinks. Perusing that pile daily is exhausting and you turn into Pavlov’s dog, endlessly refreshing even when nothing’s going on, waiting for someone to give you your next voyeuristic rush. There you have untold minutes wasted, productivity shot to hell, and the behavioral tic of instinctively typing “fac” into your URL bar until your brain catches up with your fingers.

2. I don’t like depending on a single tool. Facebook clearly wants to be the only website you ever use. Financial advisers encourage people to diversify their assets for good reason: if a single loss occurs, it’s offset by your other investments. Now imagine that everyone in your life only uses Facebook (probably not too far from reality) and you’ve lost access to your Facebook account. Want to check out your friend’s new baby photos, chat with technophobe family members or find your friends’ phone numbers? Good luck, because now you’re dependent on everyone to carve out a special case just for you. You weirdo.

3. Their questionable privacy practices freak me out. Facebook scrapes, saves, analyzes and sells many pieces of data contributed by its users. Ultimately, it’s a free website and you’re the product. I’m much more comfortable confining and contributing original content to a space over which I know I have control.

I’m delighted that a handful of friends noticed my disappearance from their feeds and were compelled to email me to ask what happened. I’m thankful for these folks, yet left wondering how I can stay in touch with everyone else.

2010 was a fantastic year for me.

First of all, I lost 55 pounds and started figuring out my body. Today I fit into a pair of size 14 jeans. Last year, I was wearing a size 24. I'm proud of this accomplishment not only because I successfully turned my food habits around, but because prior to now, I saw losing that much weight as an insurmountable obstacle. Now that I know I don't always have to be fated to my lot, I'm pretty sure I can accomplish anything. It's a pretty fantastic feeling.

Secondly, I was fortunate enough to come across a great deal on plane tickets and visited London, Cambridge and Edinburgh in April. Paul and I had an incredible time. It solidified my belief in frugality and technology in travel; not only did we manage to fly for about $650 total roundtrip, we rented an entire flat on AirBnB for only slightly more than the price of a hostel. We made our own food instead of going to restaurants for every meal and maintained our weight loss in the meantime. I packed a netbook and iPod Touch, which kept us connected and made it easy to find things to do on the cheap. Despite a volcano trying to put a kink in our plans (seriously), I had a great trip.

Lastly, I made some big career and life-in-general jumps. After I returned from the UK, I began working at Digital Dialogue with some friends of mine and had a great summer makin' with the pretty. In November, I was offered a position with my current employer here in DC. I jumped at this opportunity because the job was compelling and I'd never before lived outside of a two-hour radius of my hometown. Paul and I sold and gave away a significant portion of our possessions (including our car), packed up the rest and moved a thousand miles away to Washington. So far, everything about the experience has been fantastic and exactly what I need at this point in my life.

Throughout the year, I've made friends and lost touch with others; I've picked up useful knowledge and absorbed completely useless trivia; and I saw my life change significantly within a single year. Hopefully 2011 is just as fruitful.

As some folks already know, I've been on a quest to get healthier for the past seven months and have had success already - between the both of us, my partner-in-crime and I have lost over eighty pounds using Weight Watchers Online. It wasn't easy, but it would have been impossible had we not had access to online tools to help us track our food consumption and progress. That said, WWO could really use a boost in a couple of areas.

Cons

1. It's slow, it's crashy, and it's Flash

   Checking in to log your activity should be a quick, couple-of-minute visit, but every time I log in, I end up spending twenty minutes messing around. The Flash application that runs Weight Watchers' online tools can be mind-numbingly slow. For me, the loading screen gets more screen time than the actual application. Searching the food/exercise catalog can take an inordinate amount of time, and every second counts when you're fighting the incredible urge to not log your activity. Additionally, since I'm using the app on a more-than-thrice daily basis, it would be nice to stay logged in; however, each time I close my browser, I need to log back in.

   

2. Keyboard navigation isn't easy; shortcuts don't exist

   When you're filling in numbers and fields on a very regular basis like you do on WWO, it's necessary that your UI be navigable by keyboard alone. This is especially vital for those who are mobility-impaired. WWO, unfortunately, isn't as usable when it comes to navigating the app with anything but a mouse. As for me, I've found myself running to get my USB mouse on a regular basis just so I don't throttle my computer by its figurative neck while trying to log my activity. And yeah, no keyboard shortcuts - no quick key combination, for example, to bring up the points calculator.

3. No social network integration

   One of WW's best qualities is its emphasis on connecting with other people to encourage sticking to the plan. After all, studies show that logging on to a website to share progress leads to better progress and weight loss maintenance. Unfortunately, WWO's social networking aspects, consisting of ancient, walled-garden forums and blogs, seem wedged in as an afterthought, much like the social networking on Linkedin. This is especially apparent with the Online Tools - there's no automated way to share progress with friends from the app. I've been manually Tweeting my #weighin each Thursday; it would be great if WWO provided some means of doing the same. Why not let users share milestones with their friends on Facebook?

4. No Chrome access!?

   It's pretty inexcusable at this point in technological time to make your app unavailable to users of a very current and popular browser. I've had to keep Firefox open just to access the Online Tools, which has made it very easy to say "screw it" and stop logging my points when my Internet runs a bit slow. Not only is there no way to remain logged in to the site after you close your browser, logging in while using Chrome causes the site to send you to a stupid apology page about cookies (which, by the way, are most definitely turned on in my browser, thankyouverymuch).

   

5. Price

   It's expensive! I paid around $45 with a discount for three months of access. Having success with a lifestyle change as huge as this can be priceless, but $17.95 per month is incredibly steep for a website. However, for some people, it can be worth it for the pros:

Pros

1. Great progress indicators and analysis

   Anyone who's a graph nerd will like having all their food log and scale data in one spot and accessible from (well, mostly) any browser - you can generate nice graphs of your progress and see weekly trends in your point usage. Another big motivator is the periodic kudos you get from the app when you reach certain milestones (say, ten pounds loss or predetermined percentages of body fat loss).

   

2. Fantastic iPhone/iTouch application

   Access to the mobile application is the main reason I still pay for the service. In a few clicks, you've got access to recipes, articles, a point calculator, not to mention the tracking application. If you're stuck at the grocery store with no idea what to make and you're staring down a box of frozen Taquitos, it's awesome to be able to whip out your iPhone and search recipes by ease, time required, ingredients and more.

That said, I'm coming to the end of my subscription and contemplating not renewing it due to the cons I listed above. I hate fighting every step of the way to use a site I really don't have to use, let alone pay for. After the initial furor of logging every since bite of food into a neat little website, I've grown bored and frustrated with its lack of usability. I don't plan on stopping Weight Watchers, but I think it would be super easy to continue on the plan without paying for a subscription. I can't recommend Sparkpeople, as I couldn't stand the horrible design of the site to stick to it more than ten minutes, but I can recommend a good old pen and pencil matched with access to The Daily Plate and a spreadsheet in Google Docs. It's how Mr. Cook, who never subscribed to WW in the first place, managed to go from 200 to 145 lbs!

Designing a news site for my employer has been a crash course in content-heavy design. The design I've been working on lately went through at least five completely different iterations before arriving at its current state, and even now, I'm not satisfied with where it stands.

I appreciated the discussion of effective and ineffective mainstream news designs, many of which I studied at length, in Old News: News Sites. From what I've encountered with my current project, it's true that such a design has been affected by a million levels of bureaucracy, especially when it's a brand-new site. If you think a site redesign has a high incidence of everyone and their aunt shoehorning their pet idea into the final product, try dodging the same when there's no precedent.

The post suggests where a news design's strengths lay: scannable yet limited content, a not inordinately-long page, and well-outlined section organization. I'm always interested in reading what designers have to say on news design, since I feel that some design blogs have missed the mark on this topic. When it comes to designing with the sheer volume and varying importance of text on a news page (even when it's scaled down to just headlines, ala Drudge Report and Google News), design becomes a whole different ballgame. While it's feasible to design a news site to function as a blog would function, news is a special, extremely fast-moving and information-heavy medium with its own set of needs and requirements.

Here's another article on news design, courtesy of Smashing Magazine, which I believe discussed content-heavy design with the right kind of eye: Newspaper Website Design: Trends and Examples