Khoi Vinh: Designing the Conversation
March 31, 2009
Khoi Vinh spends a lot of time thinking about designing for different audiences. As Design Director of NYTimes.com, it’s his responsibility, in part, to keep the needs of hundreds of thousands of users in mind, not to mention the internal constituents and teams he works with inside the organization. Off-hours, he publishes Subtraction.com, where he discusses design, technology, business, and culture for a changing conversation, as Subtraction has been going for over a decade, over a gazillion years, really, in internet years.
We had the opportunity to talk with Khoi as he is beginning to plan his course, “Designing the Conversation,” which starts later this year.
School of Visual Arts: You publish a popular blog called Subtraction.com. How did Subtraction get started (and what is behind the name)?
Khoi Vinh: I originally started the site — over a dozen years ago now — as a way to promote the freelance design work that I was doing at the time. And, of course, to have a place to experiment and learn about what it means to publish online.
There’s no one reason why I chose the name “Subtraction;” I liked the arithmetic connotations; I liked the allusion to the concept of design being a process of taking things away, and maybe more than anything, I liked the way the word sounds and reads.
SVA: Since you started writing for Subtraction.com, how has your approach to creating content for the site changed?
KV: In the first few years, I treated the site in a very analog fashion; not so much as brochureware, but as a place to sporadically publish design work and creative explorations, and very much in a one-to-many paradigm, in which there was really no feedback from the site’s visitors. It was very visually oriented too — lots of large images,collages, and visually playful typography.
Subtraction.com, 1999
Over time, Subtraction.com became the primarily text-based vehicle that it is today; I publish far more writing online than I do design work. I also try to write in a way that is inclusive of my audience; I really relish the comments that readers leave, and I try to write about topics that respond to what they’re reading and thinking about.
SVA: It sounds like the experience you have on Subtraction.com is very personal, yet the work we do as designers is often about design with the intent to satisfy an audience. In creating a voice for one’s personal site, is it more important to write for an audience or to write for yourself?
KV: Actually, what I’m really trying to do is to create content that falls in that nexus between what my readership expects and what I’m interested in, what really satisfies my curiosity. Most of the time, that’s easy, but I also like to push the boundaries a bit, writing about things that I think may only be of interest to me. Well, really I’m skewing towards my own interests, but after all I’m doing all of this work for free.
Subtraction.com, 10 years later in 2009
SVA: What kinds of changes have you seen in your audience, and how have you adjusted the design of your site to meet their needs?
KV: Starting out, the audience was naturally very small, and it was easy to identify and communicate with the “regulars.” In fact I’m still very good friends with two of those early faithful readers. Over time, the audience got much bigger, and also harder to address personally. I also found I needed to visually call out the comments that I might add to a discussion, as having more than a dozen comments on a blog post made it really hard to tell what I was saying from everyone else’s contributions. Which isn’t to say that my comments are so much better, but the site is after all a lens into my own thinking, so I think readers are really looking to use what I have to say as a kind of narrative guide to the whole discussion.
However, I’d say I really haven’t done enough to really adjust the site to accommodate what users could really be doing on the site. There’s more that could be done in terms of allowing users to see all the comments they’ve added in one place, or hooking into their Facebook accounts, or allowing them to connect or respond to one another more directly. That’s one of the drawbacks of running the blog in my spare time; given more time and energy, it could be a much different experience.
SVA: The level of control you’re alluding to, in a sense, relinquishes part of the control of your site over to your readers. Is this your intention, and if so, how much presence do you want your readers to have on your site? How present do you want to be?
KV: For me, there’s no ambiguity: the site is about me and my interests and my particular lens on the world. At the end of the day, I do it for my own satisfaction, so if it becomes too much of a user-driven experience that I don’t find it fun anymore, I would stop. At the same time, I enjoy the interaction with users very much. To use an analogy, you might say it’s “my house,” but it’s the kind of house where I want to have guests over very often. That means rearranging the furniture so that people like being there.
SVA: You’re teaching a course in the MFA Interaction Design program in the fall semester called “Designing the Conversation” that states, “design consumers are demanding control over the way design solutions look, behave, respond to their needs — even how design is delivered.” In your experience, what do these changes mean for the roles of designers?
KV: It means something different for different designers. For those already steeped in social media, it means learning how to provide a kind of narrative guidance in the experiences we construct so that users get the most from a design. For those coming from analog media, it means learning how to embrace the medium and rethinking old conventions.
In both cases, we’re looking for the sweet spot between the author/editor/designer and the user, a balance that allows audiences to make use of content and tools in the way that makes the most sense to them, while also satisfying the creative urges that have always compelled designers to create terrific products and experiences.
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Many thanks to Khoi for taking time to share thoughts on the changing conversation with us and more than a decade of design writing for audiences on Subtraction.com. You can see the complete Subtraction.com here.
