Episode Transcript

Karen:

Hi, this is a Responsive Web Design Podcast. We are not going to be interviewing any people today. It’s just me and Ethan. Hi.

Ethan:

Wait, that’s a departure from our regular format, Karen.

Karen:

I know, I know. I can’t do it anymore, Ethan. I like, literally, cannot do this podcast anymore. [laughs]

Ethan:

This went to a dark place immediately! Tell me more about that, Karen. What’s going on?

Karen:

Do you ever just, like, feel unable to cope with the demands of the podcasting lifestyle?

Ethan:

[laughs] Hang on, hang on. I’m going to put on some Cure albums. Just one sec. Alright, keep going.

Karen:

So, it’s the end of March. We just got a foot of snow, and you know what? As I survey the landscape of America and the world that we live in today, I feel like we have done a great job and everybody believes in responsive web design now.

Ethan:

Yes, yes. And really, what better time to end a podcast than on the 157th episode…

Karen:

[laughs] It’s like you reach a point, you get to the 157th episode and you’re like, “Well, it’s a nice round number. We should just stop here.”

Ethan:

Yeah, totally. Yeah, we’re all about big round numbers on this program, as you well know. But no, I think you’re right. I wouldn’t go so far as to say responsive design is still the default approach. I think there are still plenty of organizations I talk to, at least, that are still trying to figure out what responsive means for them and how it fits into their strategy. But I do think you’re right, I do think it’s entered an inflection point, if you will, now the podcast is officially over. And yeah, I think that we’ve covered a lot of ground here, and I’m incredibly proud of the folks that we’ve been able to interview.

Karen:

We’ve talked to some really amazing organizations. I will say I have maintained from the start that I wanted to do this solely for selfish reasons, that I thought it would be interesting to hear from people who have done this. It’s been a great chance to call up people who I admire and respect and get them to talk to us for half an hour, and if the experience of listening or reading the transcripts was valuable to people, I hope that they enjoyed it. But really, I, personally, got a lot out of talking with everybody and getting to talk to you all the time, Ethan.

Ethan:

Yeah man, me too. I mean, I can’t thank you enough for just having the idea to start this podcast up. I mean, when you first pitched it, one of my eyebrows sort of shot up into the ceiling because I was like, “Podcasts? Well, that sounds great.”

Karen:

It was a bad idea. It was not a good idea.

Ethan:

[laughs] Well, I strongly disagree with that, first of all.

Karen:

[laughs] We tested it out; we tried to figure out if it would work for us. Turns out, 157 episodes later, it wasn’t right. But, you know…

Ethan:

That’s right, that’s right. Well, I mean, you know, it’s not just that we’re sick of podcasting. [laughs] I mean, you did have a pitch for why we should wind this down, and you have some ideas…

Karen:

Okay, let me run this by you: Okay, we’re going to shut down the podcast…

Ethan:

Go on…

Karen:

And we’re going to start a new podcast!

Ethan:

Nuh-uh!

Karen:

…That does essentially the same thing…

Ethan:

…Okay…

Karen:

…But talks about AMP.

Ethan:

I’m sorry, I have to go. Immediately. [laughs]

Karen:

[laughs] We’re going to call it The AMPcast.

Ethan:

You had me until AMP. Because, really, that’s one of my favorite things that’s happened on the internet. Yeah, well, uh…

Karen:

Okay, well let’s take off that, then. Okay, what if it’s not about AMP?

Ethan:

Do you have a second pitch take? Okay, alright.

Karen:

So, my hypothesis is that these are really valuable conversations, but that in many ways the focus on responsive web design sometimes obscures or… We could broaden the scope of this a little bit, still talk about the things that we care about a lot, but make it perhaps also more relevant to other, bigger questions.

Karen and I are ending the podcast you’re currently listening to, and we are pre-announcing a much more visually exciting podcast that we’ll be announcing in the future.

Ethan:

Yeah. No, I think that’s right. Just from my side, when I’m talking to a guest about matters of design process, or performance, even stuff like device testing, those aren’t things that are specific to responsive design, and in many cases that doesn’t come up directly in a lot of the responses that we get. It’s really, just broadly, how people work together and make some of these decisions while also trying to deal with this weird squishy layout that they’ve somehow committed to.

So, yeah, no, I think broadening the scope is pretty exciting. And we’re going to do it in an audio podcast format, you say?

Karen:

You know, that’s the other thing, is, like, what if it were more visual?

Ethan:

Hm, okay.

Karen:

I don’t know how that’s going to work.

Ethan:

Sure.

Karen:

Yeah, I have ideas, sometimes they’re bad.

No, one of the frustrations that I have with the expectation that this is a linear audio recording with a transcript is that I think sometimes we don’t take advantage of everything that, dare I say it, the web does well. Meaning that I think there’s more opportunity to talk about design and design decisions with some visuals to accompany things, to be able to actually see and hear people talking in context about the work and the decisions that they made.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that we wouldn’t be doing audio interviews and releasing things in a linear audio way, but that what I have always thought of as the transcript could wind up being a much more robust presentation of text and images and screen recordings, and video even, that might make for a similar presentation that someone could look at, but that all of these things can work together in a multimedia way.

Ethan:

Wow. Wow. A new media way, if you will.

Karen:

Hm. Mhm. Hypermedia.

Ethan:

Man, I just heard a whole bunch of VCs just kicking in our door. No, everything you said sounds very exciting to me, because I know we’ve talked a little bit about, especially in some of our earlier episodes, how a couple of our guests sent photos of their device labs or some of the sketches they sent in, but that wasn’t something that we were ever really able to successfully include in the transcript. Yeah, no, I think it would be really great to be a little bit more editorial with how we present some of these stories, and have a little bit more fun with them.

Karen:

Yeah, I think I tried to put a little bit of production work into pulling out pull quotes until Jeremy Keith killed that. Thanks Jeremy.

Ethan:

Thanks Jeremy. [laughs]

Karen:

No, that was great; that was like the best gift he’s ever given me, which is not having to pull out those pull quotes.

Ethan:

So we’re bringing them back now? [laughs]

Karen:

Mhm. You know what I’m best at, Ethan, is doing production on the podcast episodes. That’s like my—I do it months and months in advance and never like five minutes before the podcast is supposed to go live… I never do that…

Ethan:

No, no, we’re very professional podcasters here, both of us. So, yeah. [laughs] Yeah, and I just hope none of our listeners are noticing the fact that I’ve been taking episodes live at like 10:05AM, 10:30AM, 1 o’clock. I mean, some of that has been due to travel, but, you know, also it’s, yeah… We run the loosest of tight ships over here.

Karen:

Mhm. We also went through, I think, three different mailing list platforms before winding up TinyLetter, and then I hated using TinyLetter so much that I quit using it. Sorry, TinyLetter was not the problem. It’s a wonderful platform; it’s not that. It just was not… What it didn’t allow me to do was do things in advance and then schedule the posting. So, I had people ask me, after I stopped posting to the newsletter, if the podcast had shut down. And it had not, but according to those people, it already has.

I tried to put a little bit of production work into pull quotes until Jeremy Keith killed pull quotes.

Ethan:

Right, right. So, we’ll need to include an email in our omnichannel strategy for the new podcast.

Karen:

Right. So one thing that we should definitely do sometime in the near future is get that mailing list up so that if people want to hear about our new podcast, they can register and we can keep in touch with them.

Ethan:

So if you’re just joining us and you’re wondering what the heck is going on, Karen and I are basically discussing the end of the podcast you’re currently listening to and we are sort of pre-announcing a, as yet not totally planned out, but much more visually exciting, podcast that we’ll be announcing in the future.

So if you’d like to stay tuned with that, you can follow both of us on Twitter. I’m @beep, and @RWD. And Karen is @karenmcgrane. Or you can come to responsivewebdesign.com, go to that newsletter tab, and if you give us your email address, we’ll let you know when the new thing is live.

Karen:

That was very professional sounding.

Ethan:

I… Yeah, well, that’s really all I’ve got. I’m just going to be stuttering the rest of the episode.

Karen:

So, my hope is that in the next not-terribly-long amount of time we’re going to start conducting some interviews. We’ve got two fantastic episodes already lined up. And in the future, we would also like to be talking to other organizations that have pulled off essentially a very large-scale redesign. So, something that was big and complicated, took a long time to do, probably touched everything from the forward-facing digital business strategy for the organization, all the way down to the very bowels of the content management system, and everything in between.

So if anybody out there has a redesign story that they think would be worth talking about, that they would like to share lots of details and maybe connect us with multiple team members, and are willing to submit to the fact that we’re pulling off something new here and we don’t have it down to the finely-oiled machine we do after 157 episodes of the Responsive Web Design Podcast… Let us know. Get in touch with us, because I think it would be a fun thing for all of us to work on.

Ethan:

Absolutely. So yeah, if you’d like to be a guinea pig for this very exciting new podcast we’re still figuring out, we would love to hear from you.

Karen:

Mhm. And that might be an appropriate note to also say thank you to one of our longest term sponsors, which is GatherContent. Weren’t they nice people, Ethan? They were really nice.

Ethan:

They are among the nicest people. They’ve been a real joy to work with. Yeah, can’t thank them enough for being involved.

Karen:

Yeah. So, right now they have a fantastic thing going on. They had just recently published an e-book that is all about the content delivery process. I will say, a lot of the work that I do working with organizations as they’re setting up their content strategy. We go in and we make some decisions with them about what the content should be, how it should be structured, make choices about how that might work in the content management system, give recommendations for how the content should be displayed or how that should work out in the navigation and other findability systems.

But then I leave and the really heavy lifting happens from the team of people, the editorial people, the content people, the copywriters who are going to actually execute on this, and that can be a multi-month, even multi-year process for many large organizations. It’s complex, it’s time-consuming, it can be really painful, and the people at GatherContent are exactly the right people to help you out with that.

So, if you are embarking on a long-term content development process, you should totally go and get this free e-book. You can read it online or they’ll send you a downloadable version if you want to read it on an e-reader. Head yourself over to gathercontent.com/books/content-delivery. Go there right now, get that book, and that would be probably the nicest thing that you could do to say thank you to us and to say thank you to the team at GatherContent for really helping us pull this podcast off.

Ethan:

Hear, hear.

Wow, well Karen, we’re coming to the end of our 157th episode, our very last Responsive Web Design episode. Do you have any closing thoughts or reflections?

You can visit that newsletter tab, and if you give us your email address, we’ll let you know when the new show is live.

Karen:

I do, and that is that in addition to needing guests for the episode, and in addition to giving GatherContent a very fond thank you, whatever this new podcast is going to be is going to require some effort from us (damnit…), from other team members, and I think particularly from a sponsor.

So, if there’s anybody out there that wants to talk to us about sponsoring a more complex story of redesigns, also get in touch with us. We’re going to be putting this together, and we’d be happy to share more information with anybody who wants the details about what that would entail. But I’m expecting that the production values would be higher and the rigid pace of delivery would be a little bit slower.

Ethan:

I’m all about it. We’ll be a little more disciplined. [laughs]

Karen:

Sure, yes.

Ethan:

Yeah, totally. No, but I’m excited about this. When you started pitching me on this new idea, I was like, “Well, podcasts, they’re so hot right now.” But also I got really excited about being able to tell some of these stories in a much more editorial fashion. We’ve started talking about some initial ideas and I think it’s going to be a really fun project to be involved with.

Karen:

I know. I like working with you a lot! I’m willing to keep podcasting in order to make that happen.

Ethan:

Likewise, on all fronts.

Karen:

Of course, people could hire us, too. So, don’t think that the podcast is the only way for you to get to spend time with me and Ethan. You could also pay us and we’ll come to your company!

Ethan:

[laughs] That’s right. We still do those responsive web design workshops that still seem to be going pretty well. Yeah, I just like working with you, Karen McGrane, so I’m looking forward to more of that in the future.

Karen:

And who else I like working with: I want to say thanks to Selina, and Seth, and Aaron. Selina has been the absolute backbone of this podcast. Without her, I don’t know how we could have done it. She has scheduled all the guests, kept us on track with the many production details that we’ve had to take care of, and generally is a joy to work with. So, I want to say thanks to her.

Seth is our transcriber, and so for all of you who care about accessibility, he has been just amazing to work with. I have gone from reading every transcript extremely carefully to just giving them a quick pass over because he is so good and thoughtful and accurate.

And last, but certainly not least, Aaron has been an amazing audio editor. For all of our questions and for how great he makes the guests sound, none of that comes from any audio experience on my part. That is all in Aaron’s capable hands.

Ethan:

Yeah, absolutely. It wouldn’t be a show without Selina, Seth, and Aaron. So, seriously, thank you to every one of you. It’s been really fantastic.

And thanks to our guests! Frankly, it’s 157 episodes—and, you know, a couple of them were just me and Karen talking about stuff and life. But for the most part, this has been a really remarkable chance to talk to some organizations we deeply respect and admire, and during our spotlight series, when we got a chance to talk to designers and developers that we’ve looked up to for a long time. I mean, this has been an incredible show thanks, in large part, to some of the lessons folks have been willing to come on and share. So, seriously, thank you to every one of you.

Karen:

Yeah, for every organization that’s let their team come on and talk about the ups and downs of their responsive redesign… We’ve heard great feedback from lots and lots of people in the industry that said they’ve enjoyed hearing those stories and they’ve learned from them, and that’s entirely a credit to our guests.

Ethan:

Absolutely.

Alright, well, with that, for the last time…

Karen:

Should we do this thing?

Ethan:

Let’s do this thing. Why don’t you take us on home?

Karen:

Well, thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Responsive Web Design Podcast. We are not going to be back next week. But I hope to see you all in the future. So please, do check in on Twitter or swing by responsivewebdesign.com. Let us know if you’d like us to follow up with you, and we’ll keep in touch.

Ethan:

Thanks so much, Karen.

Karen:

Thank you, Ethan.