I sat digging through the map built by GrandPerspective, showing me what was chewing up 720GB of my 750GB SSD.  I already knew my iPhoto Library was the main culprit, consuming just over a third of the total volume, but surely there were other places I was wasting space.  And there were: old software installers, virtual machines I had long since ceased to need, movies I’d ripped for watching on trips and never gotten around to dumping afterward, years-old Keynote files that I’d never gotten around to compressing.  I dealt with the most obvious offenders, one way or another, and then rescanned the volume.

A set of blocks popped up near the middle of the new map, a cluster I’d not noticed before, even though they were clearly somewhat sizable.  I moused over to see what they were.

They were CD-R master images.

Images of my daughter’s medical records.

Of her MRIs.

Somewhere in there, her final brain scans, the ones where the doctors did not even bother to count the emerging tumors, there were so many.

There’s enough data in there to recreate 3D models of her brain as it turned on itself.  Enough to reconstruct the cartography of her death.

I should just delete it.  Keeping the information is pointless now, when it cannot save her, a reminder of futility and helplessness.  It’s worse than useless—because if a treatment is one day discovered, the data in these files could torture us with the certainty that her life could have been saved, if only it had started later.  Better to not know, and eke out an existence in the spare shelter of ignorance.

I’m not sure I can delete it.  No matter how horrifying the images and records might fundamentally be, they feel like pieces of her, tiny bits of her life and death.  That erasure of data would feel like an erasure of history.  Like a betrayal.  Even to shunt them from my primary machine to some sort of backup storage would feel the same as I did when we carefully packed all of her favorite toys and kindergarten drawings into a box, and stored it away, out of sight but never out of perception.

Perhaps I might feel differently if I hadn’t been missing her so keenly the past few weeks.  There doesn’t seem to be a specific reason for this, unless it’s the beginning of this specific school year.  We’ve all been feeling it, in our own ways.  A few days ago, in the middle of a weekend afternoon, the family was at home and just being a family when I suddenly felt her absence like a spiky, sickly, impossible hole in the center of the world.  It was as sharp and present as the rush of first love, very nearly tangible and visible.

I look at these files, knowing that there are no rational reasons to keep them and many reasons—rational or otherwise—to let them go.  I envision erasing them, and I can’t.  All these jagged bits of the past, which do not cling to me; rather, I cling to them, senselessly, hopelessly, afraid to look at them but afraid to let go.  Perhaps I believe that with enough of these tiny memories, these shards of her life and death, I can cobble together a wall that will shut out the void her absence tore open.

Just enough to keep functioning, for a little while longer.

Which is, I sometimes think, the worst betrayal of all.

A few more details:

• New CSS Layout (October 17-18) is two days of deep diving into flexbox, multicolumn, grid, and related technologies.  There will be a heavy emphasis on Things You Can Use Today, including bugs and how to handle them, with a keen focus on using everything in a progressively enhancing way.  In other words, you should walk away knowing how to use new technologies right away, without leaving behind users of older browsers, and have a good sense of what you’ll be able to do in the next 6-12 months.  This will be hands-on, interactive, and very much a dialogue with technical instruction.  If you’re looking for two days of watching me drone in front of a slide show, this is not that.  I’m not even sure I’ll have any slides at all—I’ll probably spend the entire time in BBEdit and a browser instead.  The class size is limited to 40 people.
• CSS Animation (November 17-18) is another two days of diving deep into the topic.  For this one, I’ll spend the first day going through every last piece of CSS transition and animation syntax, with generous helping of transform.  On the second day, Val will show how to put that syntax to use in a way that serves and strengthens your design, instead of undermining it.  It’s basically a day of learning how the tools work, and a day of learning how to properly use the tools.  Again, class size of 40; and again, very much hands-on and interactive.

So that’s what’s up.  Looking for ways to seriously expand your skills in layout or animation or both?  Come, join us!

I was a staff member of the Film Society, as well as of the university—at that point I was just over a couple of years into being the campus Webmaster and, more or less coincidentally, not quite a couple of years into being divorced.  The Film Society was a fun way to pass weekend nights in good company, contribute to a collective effort, and get to see a bunch of movies.  So when I pushed through the glass lobby doors, I looked around to see what needed to be done.  The ticket counter was already staffed by a couple of people, neither of whom I’d ever seen before.  Which was to be expected, a month into the fall semester.  We always picked up a few new members as incoming students got adjusted to campus life and looked for stuff to do.  I clearly remember one of them, a laughing girl with short-ish curly hair and a unique clothing style.

I remember because later that evening, after I’d seen the movie and was manning the concession stand for one of the later shows, she wandered over to see if I needed any help, then stayed to flirt.  For once in my life, I smoothly responded in kind.  We kept up the good-natured banter throughout the evening, peppering it with sharp looks and sardonic grins.  As things were winding down on the last show, just as I was opening my mouth to ask her if she’d like me to walk her home, she asked me if I’d like to walk her home.

And that’s how Kat and I met, twenty years ago tonight.

Anyone who knew either of us well would never have pegged the other as a likely match.  She wasn’t even an MST3K fan: she’d come to Film Society that night, a month into her graduate school studies, to join up and thus have a group to hang out with, and hadn’t even really looked at the schedule first.  We had wildly different tastes in music, art, food, recreation, even basic relationship expectations.  And yet, somehow, one way or another, with a lot of work and a lot of luck, it’s worked out.

In the time since, we’ve had experiences more amazing and suffered more deeply than either of us could have imagined, as we traded tidbits of information and innuendo over an array of candy bars that balmy September evening.  We’ve each shown strength neither of us would have imagined in ourselves.  I think we also bring out the best in each other, and that too is a kind of strength.

Two decades.  Hard to believe, sometimes, but we did it…and, as Crow might say, I’d do it again if I had to.

Thank you, Kat.

Today was his big day, and Kat and I worked hard to keep it that way.  We took his picture on the front porch, as we did for each kid on their first day, and strolled along the sidewalk.  We smiled as he shifted his brand-new backpack on his shoulders, getting used to its weight and feel with its folders and crayon box.  We ruffled our hands in his first-day-of-school haircut—a Mohawk, at his request—as he assured us that he and his friend M.L. would know everything they needed to do in school, since they’d already learned it all in preschool.  We stood with him outside the school’s front door, chatting with parents and teachers as we waited for the start of the day.  We headed into the building in a line, eventually splitting off into the kids’ room and the parents’ orientation room.

We didn’t talk about our missing third-grader, even to ourselves.  We refrained from sharing the looks, the touches, the abbreviated sentence fragments that are painfully clear to us and nobody else.  Our kids may not understand exactly what we’re saying in those moments, but they know exactly what we’re talking about, just from the way our jaws stiffen and the dull sharded light in our eyes.

We didn’t talk about our hopes of past years, how we’d looked forward to our kids walking to school together, hand in hand.  We didn’t talk about the two years we’d been away from the school, years we had expected to be there as each kid moved through the grades.  We didn’t talk about the absent eyes that would have shone with pride and protection.

We didn’t talk about how we had only made one decaf coffee for the kids that morning, instead of two.  Joshua, like Rebecca before him, loves coffee.  As long as it’s loaded with milk and sugar, that is.

Bittersweet.

As we got ready to leave the school and Joshua to his day, we gave him hugs.  He showed us the work folder he’d been given, a plain Manila folder on which the kids had been asked to draw a picture of their families.  He’d drawn us all: Kat, and me, and Carolyn, and himself.  And between him and Carolyn, a line.

A marker drawn in marker, holding open a place in his family that can never be filled.

We told him it was a great drawing, and to have a great day, and held our tears until we were well out of his sight.

It’s not fair to anyone, least of all him, that these milestones are so irrevocably tinged.  We try, and often succeed, to keep them focused on the present, to take them for what they are rather than what we wanted them to be.  And we’re getting better at it as time passes.  Better is not perfect, and I doubt it ever will be.

But if you’re reading this years from now, Joshua, please know: we were so happy to see you start kindergarten.  We truly felt joy seeing you meet your classmates and teachers, and give everyone that sly half-smile you’ve perfected.  And we felt pride at seeing that you haven’t forgotten the sister who died when you were so very young, and whose memory you keep alive in your own ways.

We may have missed Rebecca, but we didn’t miss seeing you take those first steps into your new school, and we’re beyond grateful that we could be there to see them.

Late in the afternoon, we all drove over to Mayfield Cemetery to visit Rebecca’s gravestone, two years after her death.

“She’s not here,” Kat said quietly as the kids headed back to the car, for once not making a race of it.

“I know,” I said.

“She’s in her preschool.  She’s at New Jersey.  She’s everywhere we are.  This… is the last place she is,” Kat said.

Misunderstanding her meaning, I shook my head.  “No.  The last place she was, was in our home.  In her home.”  My voice cracked on the last words.

Kat didn’t correct me.  We stood silent, holding each other, feeling the stiff rivers of pain running through each of our bodies.

The cemetery groundskeeper rolled slowly by in his SUV, giving us the “we’re closed” look.  Kat nodded at him.  The SUV rolled on.

I took some pictures of the mementos friends had left earlier in the day.  Flowers.  A rainbow-colored spinner.  A small plastic Rainbow Dash toy.  We nestled the figurine into the earth next to the stone, in hopes that it would stay safe through a summer of mowing.  I whispered a few words to my absent daughter, barely voicing apology and love and regret past the tight bands of sorrow in my throat.

We decided not to go to any of the kids’ favorite restaurants for dinner, not even Rebecca’s.  We drove instead to Chagrin Falls, to eat at Jekyll’s Kitchen, our first visit since its reopening.  After dinner, we got ice cream at Jeni’s and walked down the stairs to the falls.  We showed the kids where I had formally proposed to Kat, one icy March afternoon almost two decades before.  Carolyn was incredulous to hear that we’d jumped a closed gate to do it.  Joshua climbed over rocks and logs down on the river’s bank, falling once and then warning me about the moss on the rocks.  “The moss is very slippery,” he informed me solemnly.  “You have to be careful.”

On our way home, the clouds were underlit by sunlight which I guessed was reflecting off Lake Erie.  As we turned alongside the interstate, I spotted columns of rain off to the north, dark beneath the darker clouds.

I had a sudden hunch.  I turned off the direct path home, working north and west in a stairstep fashion.

“Why are we going this way?” Carolyn asked.

“I think your dad is stormchasing,” Kat said.

“Rainbow-chasing,” I replied.  “I just have to get us between the rain and the sun.”

Soon enough, a light sprinkle fell across the windshield.  Just as I turned west onto Cedar Road, the sprinkle intensified to a light rain.  Ahead of us, the setting sun turned utility lines into threads of golden fire.

“If there’s a rainbow, it will be behind us,” I said.  “Kids?  Is it there?”

A rustling of movement, and then: “Oh my God!” Carolyn exclaimed.

I pulled into the parking lot of the Burger King across from University Square, and there it was: strong and bright at the horizon, fainter at the zenith, paralleled by a still fainter cousin.  Well, would you look at that—double arches over Burger King, I thought, wryly.

The rainbows flared and faded as rain and clouds and sun shifted places, the slow dance of color and light.  I watched it all unfold, feeling anew the ache of regret that I hadn’t been able, hadn’t thought to try, to give her one more rainbow.  She would have loved this so much, I thought sadly.  Just as her sister and brother are loving it, right now.

“This is a sign,” Carolyn said.  “It has to be.”  I smiled softly.

Two years.  Two rainbows.

We love you, Little Spark.  We miss you.

Except no, that’s not really it.  In truth, I’m afraid of what a cure for cancer will do to me, and to Kat.

After my mom died of breast cancer in 2003, I gritted my teeth at news stories of promising new cancer treatments.  I’d think to myself, If a cure is coming soon, why couldn’t it have come sooner?  As, I’m sure, the parents of polio victims asked themselves, when the vaccine came into being.

Word came recently that the FDA is fast-tracking a novel treatment for glioblastoma, based on genetically modified polio virus.  Initial trials have been so effective, they’re opening it up to as many as possible.

And I remember reading about this treatment, which had worked in a single case, two years ago, as our daughter was treated for glioblastoma.  We tried to get access to the treatment, tried to get into a study or just be given a sample to administer, and were denied.  Twice.  They wouldn’t let us try it on a little girl with multiple tumors, when it had only been successfully tried on an adult with a single tumor.  That door was closed to us.

So the experimental treatment we tried wasn’t a modified polio virus.  It was something else.  It was something promising.  It didn’t work.

I know this polio treatment, as much as we wanted it then and as promising as it looks now, may come to nothing.  So many other treatments have before.  I remember the every-other-year drumbeat of “Is This The Cure For Cancer?” headlines and magazine covers—all about novel, promising approaches that nobody remembers now, because they didn’t work as it seemed like they might.

“A cure for cancer is the next great breakthrough in medicine, and it always will be,” I sometimes joke, a little bleakly.  But then, that’s what they used to say about polio itself.  About smallpox.  About wound infections.

I read that story about the treatment we’d begged them to let us try, and how it looked like it might cure the cancer we could not, and sick grief ached anew in my chest.  I thought, What if this really works, and we failed to get it for her?  What if I could have called that doctor again, begged and pleaded, and somehow gotten him to say yes that time, and saved Rebecca’s life?  Will I ever forgive myself if the cure was there all along, and I was too weak or blind to force it into our hands?

I still don’t know the answer.

I don’t want brain cancer to remain uncured.  I don’t want any cancer to remain uncured.  I don’t want other families to suffer what we and so many other families have suffered.  There is much I would give to bring about that day, even though it comes too late for my mother, and for my daughter.  There is much I have given, in many senses, to try to bring about that day.

When that day comes, if it ever comes, even if it’s just for one type of cancer, celebrate all the lives that will be saved.  Feel that joy and relief.  But also spare a moment of compassion for all the lives that were lost, and all the lives that were broken.  Especially for the ones who died just before the cure came, the ones who mourn both their absence and the could-have-been that came so close.

Until that day comes, if it ever comes, spare a thought for those who live sick with dread and desperate hope, wishing and praying for a breakthrough to save their loved ones.

Spare another for those who live in dread of that day, and hate that they do.

I’m inclined to post the results to a Twitter account, sort of like I did for Excuse of the Day, but I’m stuck on the most prosaic of roadblocks: I’m having trouble thinking of a good name for it.  (Here, ‘autosuggest’ will not help me.)  Anyone have a winning name they’re willing to contribute?  Full credit to the winner in the Twitter bio, not to mention here, plus a percentage of the multi-million-dollar royalties from the inevitable book and movie deals.

Update 10 May 16: thanks to everyone who made (auto)suggestions!  The final winner is @markovmywords, as suggested by Jonathan Schofield (@schofeld).

• The Web Ahead #115 — recorded LIVE! at An Event Apart Nashville, I joined Rachel Andrew, Jeffrey Zeldman, and host Jen Simmons for an hour-plus look at the present and future of web design and web design technologies, featuring a number of really sharp questions submitted by the audience as we talked.  We got Nostradamic with this one, so warm up the claim chowder pots!
• User Defenders #20 — Sara and I talked with host Jason Ogle for just over an hour about Design for Real Life, digging deep into the themes and our intentions.  Jason really brought great questions from having just read the book, and I feel like Sara and I kept our answers focused and compact.
• The Big Web Show #144 — Jeffrey and I talked for just under an hour about Design for Real Life and the themes of my AEA talk this year.  This one’s more of a ramble between two friends and colleagues, so if you prefer conversation a little looser, this one’s for you.

Share and enjoy!

In a moment of slight coincidence, the episode was released almost exactly a year after my first appearance on Shop Talk (espisode #161), where I covered similar topics.  At that point, Sara and I were still researching and tossing ideas for the book back and forth.  Now here we are, a year later, with the book out.  It’s a little wild to contemplate, honestly.  It was a lot of work in a pretty short time frame… but so very much worth it.

I have two pieces, as is traditional for The Manual: an article titled “We Are What We Build”, and a short, untitled ‘life lesson’ about a whiny 12-year-old me and my grandfather’s quiet wisdom.

A quote from “We Are What We Build”:

The challenge now is in how those fragments of our lives are treated. This is as much a social question as a technological problem, but the two are not separable. What Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and every other at-scale social network does now—everything they make possible or impossible, everything they make easier or harder—will shape what we think of as normal in a decade or two.

Past readers may recognize this sentiment (as well as the title) from my talk at XOXO 2015, which was heavily intertwined with the article for The Manual.  One led to the other, in fact.  I proposed the talk, which Andy B. accepted, and then Andy M. asked me if I’d write it for The Manual.  So I did.

I was glad to write both, and I hope you enjoy them… and more importantly, I hope they provoke some reflection.

When we get laser-focused on positive outcomes, we often fail to notice how things might go terribly wrong. But whether you’re working on something as complex as artificial intelligence or as simple as a line of microcopy, you’ll create the best products when you intentionally set aside your goals of “delight” or “engagement,” and make time to think critically about where your product might break.

It’s easy to see this as an uncomfortable restriction on the creative process, and that’s actually a pretty accurate description. Of course thinking about users’ varied identities and emotional states creates limiting factors. But that’s what design is: it is a creative solution to a set of constraints.

Read the whole thing over at UX Booth.

Available as of this morning from A Book Apart in both digital and paper formats: Design for Real Life, the book Sara Wachter-Boettcher and I started writing not quite a year ago.

Anil Dash was kind enough to write a wonderful foreword for the book, in which he perfectly describes the background we were working against:

Two billion people now have some kind of access to internet technologies, and almost all of them are spending more and more time with their thumbs flicking across their phones. And the technology they’re using has a real impact on their lives. They don’t use an app to “share photos”; they use it to maintain a relationship with distant family. They don’t need to do “online banking”; they need to lend a friend money to help them out of a jam. Nobody wants to learn a complicated set of privacy controls; they just want to be able to express themselves without antagonizing bosses or in-laws.

Our thesis, against that, was to say, “As personal and digital lives become closer and effectively merge, the things we design will have to work harder and harder to deal with real people in all their messy complexity.  How can we start people thinking about this, and what tools can we give them?”  That’s what we strove to create, and now you can judge for yourself whether we succeeded.

I’ll be honest: we were pretty scared as we wrote it.  This is not a topic area that’s gotten a ton of attention, and in a lot of ways we were breaking new ground—but, at the same time, we were very aware that there was existing research and knowledge in related areas, so we wanted to be sure we were inclusive or, and respectful of, that work.  We talked to a lot of people in a variety of disciplines, trying to make sure we brought in information that would help the reader and not flying in the face of things that were already known.

So you can imagine our relief and gratitude as we’ve heard glowing reactions from people who read preview drafts—among them Kim Goodwin, Indi Young, Sara Soueidan, Caren Litherland, and Karen McGrane.  Paul Ford said, “Anyone who aspires to build global products that people love should read this book now,” and Kate Kiefer Lee said, “It will be required reading on my team.”

You might think cover blurbs like those are pure marketing fluff, and maybe in some genres they are.  For us, they serve double duty: to let you know that people who know what they’re talking about believe we know what we’re talking about, and also to let us know that.  There were days we weren’t entirely certain.

To be clear, this isn’t a book about forever treating people with kid gloves.  We say “compassion isn’t coddling”, and that’s absolutely the case.  An error message still needs to convey the error; an account lockout still needs to keep the account locked.  But how we convey errors or lockouts, and how we make people aware of the possible ramifications of their actions, is critical.  Just as there are good ways and bad ways to commiserate with a grieving friend or handle a difficult work situation, there are good ways and bad ways to approach people in our designs.

As I said before, we need to deal with real people, in all their messy complexity.  We hope Design for Real Life is the start of a whole new conversation within our field, one that will teach Sara and me just as much as anyone else about how we can be more thoughtful and humane in what we create.

On March 8th, 2016—just eight days from the day I’m writing this—Design for Real Life will be available from A Book Apart.  My co-author Sara Wachter-Boettcher and I are really looking forward to getting it into people’s hands.

The usual fashion is to say something like “getting it into people’s hands at long last”, but in this case, that’s not really how it went down.  Just over a year ago now, Sara published “Personal Histories”, and it was a revelation.  In her post, I could see the other half of the book that was developing in my head, a book that was growing out of “Designing for Crisis” and “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty”.  So I emailed Sara and opened with:

Your post was like a bolt of lightning for me.  In the same way the Year in Review thing opened my eyes to what lay beyond “Designing for Crisis”, your post opened my eyes to how far that land beyond reaches.

After research and some intense discussions, we started writing in the spring of 2015, and finished before summer was over.  Fall of 2015 was devoted to rewrites, revisions, additions, and editing.  Winter 2015-2016 was spent in collaborative editorial and production work by the amazing team at A Book Apart.  And now…here we are.  The book is just a week away from being in people’s hands.

To celebrate, Sara and I will be hosting, with incredibly generous support from A Book Apart and PhillyCHI, a launch party at Frankford Hall in Philadelphia.  We’ll be providing some munchies, some tasty adult beverages, and there will be giveaways of both paper and digital copies of the book.  We’d love to see you there!  If you can make it, please do RSVP at that link, so we know how much food to order.

We chose Philadelphia as the site for our launch party for a few reasons.  For one, Sara lives there, so only one of us had to travel.  But to me, it brings some very personal histories full circle, because Philadelphia is where this really all got started.  It’s where Rebecca first went to be treated, where she was given the best possible shot at life, and where I started to notice the failures and successes of user experience design when it collided with the stresses of real life.

In a number of ways, this book has been a labor of love.  The most important, I think, is the love Sara and I have for our field, and how we would love to see it become more humane—really, more human.  That’s why we packed the book not just with examples of good and bad design choices, but of how we can do better.  The whole second part of the book is about how to take the principles we explore in the first part and put them to work right now—not by throwing out your current process and replacing it with a whole new, but by bringing them into your existing practice.  It’s very much about enhancing what you already do.

It’s been an intense process, both emotionally and work-wise.  We pushed as hard as we could to get this to you as soon as we could.  Now the time is almost here.  We’re really looking forward to hearing what you think of it.

There were a lot of strange confluences that went into that talk, some of them horrific, others just remarkable.  One that stands out for me, as I look at that screenshot, is how a few years ago, Jared Spool gave a talk at AEA where he discussed the GE Adventure Series, in a segment that never failed to choke me up (and often choked up Jared).  I remember being completely floored by that example, and at one point, based solely on what he’d said about the GE Adventure Series, I remarked to Jared that I occasionally thought about switching career tracks to become an experience designer.

Less than two years later, I stood in one of the first Adventure Series rooms at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, standing in the middle of a design I’d only ever seen on a projector screen, the same room you can see in the screenshot above, as my daughter’s head was scanned to see if the experimental medicine we’d been giving her had slowed her tumors.

Six months after that, I was talking about it on stage in Orlando, as an example of how designing for crisis can have spectacularly positive results.  The video we released last week came a year later, and is a much better version of that first talk.  I’m very happy that we can now share it with the world.

As I’ve said before, I came to realize that “Designing for Crisis” was just one piece of a larger puzzle.  To start exploring and understanding the whole puzzle, I recently finished co-authoring Design for Real Life with Sara Wachter-Boettcher, to be published by A Book Apart, possibly as soon as March (but there’s not an official date yet, so that could change).  In it, Sara and I explore a small set of principles to use in approaching design work, and talk about how to incorporate those principles into your existing design practice.  The book is the foundation for a new talk I’ll be presenting at every An Event Apart in 2016—including this year’s Special Edition show in Orlando.

As soon as the book is available for order, we’ll let everyone know—but for now, I hope you’ll find last year’s talk useful and enlightening.  Several people have told me it changed the way they approach their work, and it serves as a pretty good introduction to the ideas and themes I’ve built on it for the book and this year’s talk, so I hope it will be an hour well spent.

From out of that experience, a lot of things grew.  I realized that “Designing for Crisis” was one piece of a larger topic, started to get a handle on that topic, and teamed up with Sara Wachter-Boettcher to create a book which we just finished writing, title to be announced shortly, and expect to be on shelves within a few months.

In parallel to that, I was asked to talk with the design and content teams at Facebook, which I did in the spring of 2015.  It was an incredibly productive and honest discussion, entirely because the team at Facebook was truly concerned and open to change.  You can see how this has evolved over time in On This Day, whose messaging has become more human and sensitive to the possibility of harm.  And you can especially see it in the 2015 edition of Year in Review.

Whereas last year, the YiR feature was clearly designed around awesome years and happy people, this year’s is a lot more respectful and careful.  It isn’t as dynamic, but when it comes to memories, this seems entirely appropriate.  As Sara and I say in our book, this is “what it looks like when an organization embeds caring into its product, and is willing to own up to mistakes”.

I know the Facebook copy “we care about you and the memories you share” has been derided in some quarters, because people reflexively assume that no company (least of all Facebook) actually cares about you as anything more than a sales unit.  Maybe that’s true of some parts of Facebook—it’s a very large company, after all, with a lot of competing fiefdoms—but the design and content teams were writing from the heart.  They honestly do care about the people who use their products, and they care very much about how their work affects people.  They know they’ll stumble sometimes, but they’re committed to trying anyway and learning from their stumbles.  For that alone, they have my deepest respect.  To forge ahead in front of an audience of well over a billion people takes an incredible amount of courage.

Year in Review will be a part of the talk I’ll be giving in 2016 at An Event Apart, just as it was of Sara’s and my forthcoming book.  In brief, the assessment that you’ll find in both places: Year in Review 2015 is a significant step forward, a great example of compassionate design at scale.  I applaud Facebook for forging a path forward.