Everybody at Newfangled has a superpower. Mine is baking pies:

But if I were going to choose something a little more practical (which goes against the point of a superpower), I would point to my secret identity as a grammar nerd. Before coming to Newfangled, I majored in English, taught freshman composition, and tutored in a writing center. Working at a place where a lot of writing takes place, I end up doing a fair amount of editing. Chris has recently provided a lot of good advice on professional writing; this is my take on another side of the process.

The common understanding of what English majors do tends to involve a lot of punctuation--"Uh-oh! I better watch my grammar!" was a popular comment when I used to introduce myself as a writing teacher. I do happen to be a punctuation fan, but that kind of stuff was actually a very minor part of any of my previous roles; instead, the writing program where I taught focused on upper-level concerns like introducing students to college-level work and teaching them how to revise their writing. One of the things we stressed was that what many students thought of as editing--checking the commas, basically--was just the last, and in some ways the least important, stage of a bigger process.

Not every piece of professional writing you do will involve the same steps I used to put my freshmen through. But there are three general stages of revision that will probably come into play in some form for most of the writing you do. They can be characterized as:

1. Editing
At this stage, the focus should be on the big picture. What are you really saying? How are you engaging your audience? How is your piece structured? Until you've got that kind of stuff figured out, it's not worth getting too hung up on the commas.

2. Copyediting
Once you've got the ideas in place and structured the way you want them, you can start focusing more on the wording. Your draft will probably have some unclear patches where you weren't sure what you wanted to say until after you had said it; now that you know, this is the time to clean it up.

3. Proofreading
Here's the part where you make sure everything is ready for presentation. Run spellcheck (but don't assume it knows everything), and yes, clean up those commas.

If you find yourself asked to help a colleague with some writing--good for you! You must have gotten a reputation as a grammar nerd yourself. In that case, one of the most important things I would recommend (especially if it's the first time this person has enlisted you as an editor) is taking some time up front to find out where in the revision process your writer is. Whereas all the students in my composition classes were supposed to be on the same trajectory, real-world writers may seek out help at any stage, and that can determine what editing approach will be effective. If it's early on, and your colleague is trying to use you as a sounding board for ideas, there's not much point going through and fixing the spelling; the words are likely to change several times anyway. In that situation, it may be more helpful for you to ask questions that help focus the argument, or point out places where an idea could be developed more. On the other hand, sometimes the last-minute comma check is exactly what's needed; in those cases, making structural suggestions may just cause frustration about issues there isn't really time to address.

The editing I do at Newfangled falls at all points of this range. Most frequently, I'll get a question along the lines of "How does this sentence look?". I'll say, "Looks good!" or "Take out the comma," and that's that.

Less frequently but more consistently, I edit the Newfangled newsletter each month before it goes to press. Several factors make this process different than a one-off sentence or paragraph correction:
-I'm working with an entire document rather than just an isolated section. Seeing the big picture gives me the chance to make general structural suggestions or get a better sense of the overall tone.
-I get the draft a little in advance of the publish date, which makes it possible to address those kinds of upper-level issues when needed. There's time to sit down and talk through any points that are unclear.
-I'm working with the same writer every month, which has allowed me to develop a sense of what kinds of feedback will be useful. For instance, the introduction is often one of the last things written (which is a very common writing strategy and is generally the approach I would recommend), so it's usually a key topic of discussion.

Because my background is in teaching rather than commercial editing, the editing style I've learned focuses heavily on getting people to develop and express their own ideas. One of my tendencies as an editor is therefore to want the writer to do the rewriting, rather than swooping in with a red pen and doing it all myself. The earlier in the revision process, the stronger that tendency is. If I find an idea unclear, I'll usually ask questions about it that lead to a discussion about ways the writer can clarify; if the wording is unclear in a certain spot, I'll write out an alternate wording or two but leave it up to the writer to choose which to use; if I see a misspelling or punctuation error, I'll usually just take care of it. Again, how appropriate this hands-off style is depends on the situation. I like that it allows authors to retain a sense of intellectual ownership over their writing and to know the final product still feels like their voice. (Ending up with a document that doesn't sound like me is one of the things I want to avoid when getting my own writing edited.) On the other hand, it would probably be good for me to develop more comfort with just jumping in and taking care of everything when the situation calls for it.

What about you--do you collaborate on writing, either as an author or an editor? If you seek out editing for your writing, what kinds of responses do you find helpful? If you tend to be the one doing the editing, how do you approach the situation?

Our North Carolina office is in a cool old building, with old hardwood floors and almost everybody in one open room and another business upstairs. As with any older building, it has its own set of sounds that fill out its character. Here are two ways that sound travels around 103 Lloyd Street:

1. One manifestation of our strong company culture is that we (happily, voluntarily) eat lunch as a group most days. During a recent after-work gathering of internet types in the Carrboro/Chapel Hill area, one of our upstairs neighbors asked Mark, "What on earth do you guys *do* in that corner of the building?" Upon questioning, it turned out that "that corner" was the room where we have lunch, and "what we do" is laugh, a lot, such that the people upstairs can hear it.

2. Our building was originally the town's freight depot. (The passenger depot, a few feet across the tracks, is now a restaurant called Southern Rail.) Carrboro started as a railroad stop for University of North Carolina students, then turned into a mill town due to its railroad-convenient location, so being in one of the original train depots gives us a pretty cool connection to the town's history. But sometimes--as many of our clients can tell you--we have to pause a conversation so the train can go by. Here's why:

The railing on the right is a back entrance to the office; the brick wall is the exterior of our conference room. On the left--that's a train. The embedded audio clip was recorded from my desk as another train passes. It doesn't capture the extent to which that sound can fill the room, but it does go to show that this is a common event for us; the typing continues apace.

Last time I wrote about our recent brahmin.com site build, it was to talk about the advanced product search. It's a great feature, and especially important on a product-focused site, where you want users to be able to find the product they want as easily as possible.

But 'easy' won't equal 'search' for all users; as Jakob Nielsen's usability studies have found, while many people will always start by searching, others prefer to navigate their way through a site via links, and still others will vary their approach depending on circumstances. For the latter group, clearly-structured navigation can shift their preference toward browsing. And as Nielsen points out, clear navigation is important even for search-dominant users, since that's what will give them a sense of where on the site their search has landed them. The complement to an easy-to-use search should therefore be an easily understandable nav structure; pairing the two lets users take whichever approach they're most comfortable with, making it more likely that they'll find what they're looking for.

Here are a few things we did while planning brahmin.com to figure out how best to approach the nav:

Hacked up the prototype
There are some features of our prototype system that are standard and automated; one of the big ones is that it uses a top nav with dropdowns, and an additional left nav on subpages. The grayscreen is not supposed to represent design, and with any prototyping process, there will be some things that require stretching the imagination to envision. For this project, however, the design was one of the greatest driving factors, and we knew from the start what the general page structure would be. We therefore departed from the norm and had Dave, the developer on this project, alter the prototype so that it functioned a little more like we knew the site would.

We shifted from using our standard top navigation--something like this:

--to having the main nav on the left, like the site would. Here's the prototyped navigation on the homepage, compared to how it ended up on the live site:

When you go into one of the subsections, the nav expands to show the range of options within that section. Again, here's the prototype vs the live site:

As you can tell, the navigation in the prototype still doesn't behave quite like the real navigation does. To accommodate all the options needed under important sections like Handbags, we built in an alternate area that appeared under the nav instead of within it--so some imagination was still required to picture how the nav would really work. But what we were working from during the planning stages was still relatively close to the real deal.

Included the most relevant product groupings right there in the nav
In deciding what categories to use within the nav, we asked Brahmin to think about the ways that customers would be likely to look for a bag. They pinpointed the most important as being the bag's type (tote, clutch, etc), collection, and color. Focusing on those categories in the nav gave us a way to let users browse based on the most likely criteria without cluttering the field of possibilities with too many options.

One of the key decisions here was how to treat color as a category. For me, the color option is the best part of the nav--there's something very satisfying about seeing the samples of the colors all together, and getting a page like this when you choose one:

But it would have been impossible to create a nav that represented every color that every bag came in; that's a huge set already and will expand frequently as Brahmin continues to update their product line. So we created a system where a product can have both a specific color (butternut, burnt sugar, brulee) and a more general color group (brown). Clicking the brown square in the nav will give you the bags that come in all of those colors and similar shades--a pretty way to shop.

Added a mouseover for the collections
For one of the nav categories, there was a potential divide between usefulness for returning and new users: a bag's collection might be an important factor for an existing Brahmin customer, but just listing the collection names wasn't likely to give new customers the guidance they needed. To address this potential issue during prototyping, we added a box that appears when you mouse over the collection name and provides a better sense of that collection's style:

We spent some time considering what information would be most useful in that area. Ultimately, Duffy & Shanley created graphics for each collection that give a preview while maintaining the site's style:

One site Jason and I were excited to send live recently is brahmin.com, a Massachussetts-based manufacturer of upscale handbags and other leather goods. Since the site's launch in September, we've gotten a number of comments about how good it looks (thanks to Duffy & Shanley, the agency that provided the design) and how well it performs (thanks to Dave, the developer on the project, who made sure that the site's enormous database didn't slow it down). This was a complex project with several cool features; here I want to focus on just one of them, the product search.

With a site meant for shopping, making it easy for customers to find what they want is obviously a top priority. We decided that the best approach would be a smart text search like the one on apple.com. To see what I mean, head over to the Apple site and start typing in something you might want to search for: say, lapt... or i...well, i-anything. See what happens? As you type, likely results autofill in a dropdown, with a graphic representation right there to give you a better idea of what each one is. Pretty cool.

For the search on Brahmin.com, we took the autofill concept and applied it to the content that was most important for users to find: the products. If you go to brahmin.com and start typing in a search query, you'll get a dynamic  recalculating list of products that match your terms.

This search doesn't just let you search by the product's name, though; it's actually an advanced search in an unconfusing, non-intimidating disguise. Say I like the Soft Melbourne collection, but I also know I really want a black bag. Easy:

We're excited about this new search feature, and it will probably show up on more of the sites we build in the future. For the successful execution, we again have Dave to thank; speed is key here, and he made sure that the results come up quickly enough for users to understand and work with intuitively. There are still plenty of situations where a more traditional advanced search with multiple variables will make more sense, but two specific aspects of the Brahmin project made this model a great fit here:

1. The users are highly expert. Not that all of them will be technically expert--some undoubtedly won't, which made ease of use a high priority in planning this feature. But they are expert in the subject matter at hand. They know what a red satchel is, they have a sense of whether that's what they're looking for, and so it makes sense to give them maximum control over their search terms.

2. The search meshes well with the compelling and frequently updated photography on the site. Say I come to the homepage and see this:

I may see that and know that Jacqueline is my bag, but marigold is not my color; or i may love the marigold but want to see if it comes in a different kind of bag. No problem:

Like a fine handbag, that capability is both elegant and practical.