An anonymous reader writes from a report via Ars Technica: A federal judge has been convinced by the FBI to block the disclosure of where the bureau has attached surveillance cams on Seattle utility poles. Ars Technica writes about how such a privacy dispute is highlighting a powerful tool the authorities are employing across the country to spy on the public with or without warrants. Ars Technica reports: "The deployment of such video cameras appears to be widespread. What’s more, the Seattle authorities aren’t saying whether they have obtained court warrants to install the surveillance cams. And the law on the matter is murky at best. In an e-mail to Ars, Seattle city attorney spokeswoman Kimberly Mills declined to say whether the FBI obtained warrants to install surveillance cams on Seattle City Light utility poles. ‘The City is in litigation and will have no further comment,’ she said. Mills suggested [Ars] speak with the FBI office in Seattle, and they did. Peter Winn [assistant U.S. attorney in Seattle] wrote to Judge Jones that the location information about the disguised surveillance cams should be withheld because the public might think they are an ‘invasion of privacy.’ Winn also said that revealing the cameras’ locations could threaten the safety of FBI agents. And if the cameras become ‘publicly identifiable,’ Winn said, ‘subjects of the criminal investigation and national security adversaries of the United States will know what to look for to discern whether the FBI is conducting surveillance in a particular location.’"
A 200+ document that appears to be a Democratic anti-Trump playbook compiled by the Democratic National Committee has leaked online following this week’s report that the DNC was breached by Russian hackers. In it, Trump is pilloried as a “bad businessman” and “misogynist in chief.”
The document—which according to embedded metadata was created by a Democratic strategist named Warren Flood—was created on December 19th, 2015, and forwarded to us by an individual calling himself “Guccifer 2.0,” a reference to the notorious, now-imprisoned Romanian hacker who hacked various American political figures in 2013.
The package forwarded to us also contained a variety of donor registries and other strategy files, “just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC’s network,” the purported hacker claimed over email, adding that he’s in possession of “about 100 Gb of data including financial reports, donors’ lists, election programs, action plans against Republicans, personal mails, etc.”
His stated motive is to be “a fighter against all those illuminati that captured our world.”
The enormous opposition document, titled simply “Donald Trump Report,” appears to be a summary of the Democratic Party’s strategy for delegitimizing and undermining Trump’s presidential aspirations—at least as they existed at the end of last year, well before he unseated a field of establishment Republicans and clinched the nomination. A section titled “Top Narratives” describes a seven-pronged attack on Trump’s character and record.
The first is the argument that “Trump has no core”:
One thing is clear about Donald Trump, there is only one person he has ever looked out for and that’s himself. Whether it’s American workers, the Republican Party, or his wives, Trump’s only fidelity has been to himself and with that he has shown that he has no problem lying to the American people. Trump will say anything and do anything to get what he wants without regard for those he harms.
Second, that Trump is running a “divisive and offensive campaign”:
There’s no nice way of saying it – Donald Trump is running a campaign built on fear-mongering, divisiveness, and racism. His major policy announcements have included banning all Muslims from entering the U.S., and calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “drug dealers” while proposing a U.S.-Mexico border wall. And Trump’s campaign rallies have become a reflection of the hateful tone of his campaign, with protestors being roughed up and audience members loudly calling for violence.
Third, Trump is a “bad businessman”:
Despite Trump’s continual boasting about his business success, he has repeatedly run into serious financial crises in his career and his record raises serious questions about whether he is qualified to manage the fiscal challenges facing this country. Trump’s business resume includes a long list of troubling issues, including his company’s record of forcing people from their homes to make room for developments and outsourcing the manufacturing of his clothing line to take advantage of lower-wage countries like China and Mexico. His insight about the marketplace has proven wrong many times, including in the run-up to the Great Recession. And Trump’s record of irresponsible and reckless borrowing to build his empire – behavior that sent his companies into bankruptcy four times – is just one indication of how out-of-touch he is with the way regular Americans behave and make a living, and it casts doubt on whether he has the right mindset to tackle the country’s budget problems.
Trump’s policies – if you can call them that – are marked by the same extreme and irresponsible thinking that shape his campaign speeches. There is no question that Donald Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous – but his actual agenda could be a catastrophe.
Fifth, in classically corny Democratic Party style, Donald Trump is the “misogynist in chief”:
Through both his words and actions, Trump has made clear he thinks women’s primary role is to please men. Trump’s derogatory and degrading comments to and about women, as well as his tumultuous marriages, have been well publicized. And as a presidential candidate, Trump has adopted many of the backwards GOP policies that we’ve come to expect from his party.
Sixth, Donald Trump is an “out of touch” member of the elite:
Trump’s policies clearly reflect his life as a 1-percenter. His plans would slash taxes for the rich and corporations while shifting more of the burden to the shoulders of working families. He stands with Republicans in opposing Wall Street reform and opposing the minimum wage. Trump clearly has no conception of the everyday lives of middle class Americans. His description of the “small” $1 million loan that his father gave him to launch his career is proof enough that his worldview is not grounded in reality.
The seventh strategy prong is to focus on Trump’s “personal life,” including that “Trump’s Ex-Wife Accused Him Of Rape,” which is true.
What follows is roughly two hundred pages of dossier-style background information, instances of Trump dramatically changing his stance on a litany of issues, and a round-up of the candidate’s most inflammatory and false statements (as of December ‘15, at least).
It appears that virtually all of the claims are derived from published sources, as opposed to independent investigations or mere rumor. It’s also very light on anything that could be considered “dirt,” although Trump’s colorful marital history is covered extensively:
The DNC hack was first revealed Tuesday, when the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike announced it had discovered two hacking collectives, linked to Russian intelligence, inside the DNC network after the DNC reported a suspected breach. In a blog post, the company identified the groups as “COZY BEAR” and “FANCY BEAR”—two “sophisticated adversaries” that “engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation.”
The hackers were able to access opposition files and may have been able to read email and chat traffic, but did not touch any financial, donor, or personal information, the DNC said Tuesday. However, the user who sent the files to Gawker refuted that claim, writing, “DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said no financial documents were compromised. Nonsense! Just look through the Democratic Party lists of donors! They say there were no secret docs! Lies again! Also I have some secret documents from Hillary’s PC she worked with as the Secretary of State.”
Among the files sent to Gawker are what appear to be several lists of donors, including email addresses and donation amounts, grouped by wealth and specific fundraising events. Gawker has not yet been able to verify that the Trump file was produced by the DNC, but we have been able to independently verify that the financial documents were produced by people or groups affiliated with the Democratic Party.
Also included are memos marked “confidential” and “secret” that appear to date back to 2008, and pertain to Obama’s transition into the White House, and a file marked “confidential” containing Hillary’s early talking points, at least some of which ended up being repeated verbatim in her April, 2015 candidacy announcement.
Finally, there is a May, 2015 memo outlining a proposed strategy against the field of potential GOP candidates. Donald Trump, who had not yet officially announced his candidacy, does not appear in the document.
The purported hacker writes “it was easy, very easy” to hack and extract thousands of files from the DNC network, “the main part” of which he or she claims are in the custody of Wikileaks. He or she also appears to have sent the documents to The Smoking Gun, which posted about the dossier earlier today.
Warren Flood did not immediately return a request for comment. DNC Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach was not able to immediately confirm the authenticity of the documents, but the party is aware that they’re circulating.
“Be agile; release early; release often.” We know the drill. But is it strategically wise to keep rolling out features often? Especially once a product you’re building reaches a certain size, you probably don’t want to risk the integrity of your application with every new minor release.
The worst thing that can happen is that loyal users, customers who have been using that one little feature consistently over the years, suddenly aren’t able to use it in the same convenient way; the change might empower users more, but the experience becomes less straightforward. Frustration and anxiety enter social media quickly and suddenly, and the pressure on customer support to respond meaningfully and in time increases with every minute. Of course, we don’t want to roll out new features only to realize that they actually hurt loyal users.
We can prevent this by being more strategic when rolling out new versions of our products. In this article, we’ll look into a strategy for product designers and front-end engineers to thoroughly test and deploy a feature before releasing it to the entire user base, and how to avoid UX issues from creeping up down the road.
Before diving into an actual testing strategy, let’s step back and examine common misconceptions of how a new feature is designed, built and eventually deployed.
Whenever a new feature for an existing product is designed, the main focus is usually on how exactly it should be integrated in the existing interface. To achieve consistency, we designers will often look into existing patterns and apply the established design language to make the new feature sit well in the UI. However, problems often occur not because components don’t work together visually, but rather because they turn out to be confusing or ambiguous when combined in unexpected ways.
Perhaps the interface’s copy is ambiguous in related but distant areas of the website, or the outcome of two features being actively used at the same time makes sense from a technical perspective but doesn’t match user expectations or has major performance implications and hurts the UX.
In fact, in design, it is these numerous combinations that are so difficult to thoroughly predict and review. One way to approach the problem while already in the design process is by considering the outliers — use cases when things are more likely to go wrong. What would a user profile look like if the user’s name is very long? Is an overview of unanswered emails still obvious when a dozen inbox labels are being used? Would a new filter make sense for users who have just signed up and have just a few emails in their inbox?
How exactly can we design the outliers once we’ve identified them? A good strategy is to study the different states of the user interface. The “user interface stack,” an idea introduced by Scott Hurff, is versatile and complicated, and when we design our interfaces, usually it’s not enough to craft a pixel-perfect mockup in Photoshop, Sketch or HTML and CSS — we have to consider various edge cases1 and states2: the blank state, the loading state, the partial state, the error state and the ideal state. These aren’t as straightforward as we might think.
3 As designers, we tend to focus on the ideal state and the error state. Yet from a UX perspective, the ideal state isn’t necessarily perfect, and the error state doesn’t have to be broken. Large view.4 (Image: “Why Your UI Is Awkward5,” Scott Hurff)
The blank state doesn’t have to be empty — we could be using service workers6 to provide a better offline experience to regular visitors. The partial state doesn’t have to be broken — we could improve the experience with broken images7 and broken JavaScript through progressive enhancement.
The ideal state might significantly differ from our “perfect result” mockups — due to custom user preferences and the user’s browser choice; some content and web fonts might not be displayed8 because of a browser’s configuration, for example.
9 Prefill Forms Bookmarklet10 lets you plug in pre-defined content snippets to check your web forms, including inputs that are too lengthy or too short.
So, the landscape is, as always, complex, convoluted and unpredictable, and we can’t make the risk of things going wrong negligible, but this doesn’t mean we can’t minimize the risk effectively. By exploring outliers and the entire user interface stack early on, we can prevent common UX issues in the early design stage. It doesn’t get easier on the technical side, though.
Even minor changes tend to lead to chain reactions, introducing bugs in areas and situations that seem to be absolutely unrelated. The main reason for this is the sheer amount of variables that influence the user experience but that are out of our control. We do know our ways with browsers, but that doesn’t mean we know more about the context11 in which a user chooses to see the website we have so tirelessly and thoroughly crafted.
Now, while minor changes like the padding on a button or a progressively enhanced textarea might not seem like a big deal, we tend to underestimate the impact of these shiny little changes or features on a large scale. Every single time we make a design or development decision, that change does have some effect in the complex system we’re building, mostly because the components we are building never exist in isolation.
The reality is that we never just build a button, nor do we never just write a new JavaScript function — buttons and functions belong to a family of components or libraries, and they all operate within a certain setting, and they are unavoidably connected to other parts of the system by their properties or by their scope or by their name or by the team’s unwritten conventions.
These “silent,” hardly noticeable connections are the reason why rolling out features is difficult, and why predicting the far-reaching consequences of a change often proves to be an exercise in keen eyesight. That’s why it’s a good idea to avoid unnecessary dependencies12 as far as you can, be it in CSS or JavaScript — they won’t help you with maintenance or debugging, especially if you’re relying on a library that you don’t fully understand.
13 Close area is typically reserved for our best friends, so no wonder that we develop emotional connections with our phones. Yes, individual context matters, but there are also many other contexts14 that we have to consider. Large view.15
Luckily, to better understand the impact of a change, we can use resources such as a browser’s developer tools. We can measure the reach16 of a selector17 or the reach18of a JavaScript function19, and sometimes it might be a good idea to keep coming back to it during development to keep the scope of the change as local and minimal as possible.
This is helpful, but it’s also just one part of the story. We make assumptions, consciously and unconsciously, based on our own experience with the interface and our own habits — often forgetting that assumptions might (and, hence, will) vary significantly from user to user. Most applications do have just one interface, but this interface or its configurations can have dozens of states — with views changing depending on the user’s settings and preferences.
Think about dashboards with cards that can be customized (analytics software), mail clients with “compact,” “comfortable” and “detailed” views (Gmail), a booking interface that changes for logged-in customers and for guests, a reading experience for people using an ad blocker or an aggressive antivirus filter. The butterfly effect has an impact on more than just the code base; all of those external factors weigh in as well, and testing against them — unlike with unit tests or QA in general — is very difficult because we often don’t even know what to test against.
We can use diagnostics and metrics to determine what changes need to be made, but by following data alone, you might end up stagnating at what we tend to call a “local maximum,” a state of the interface with a good enough design but that utterly lacks innovation because it always follows predictable, logical iterations. When working on a project and exploring the data, we tend to group features in the following four buckets:
Broken features. Features that appear to be broken or inefficient — obviously, we need to fix them;
Unused features. Features that work as intended but are rarely used — often a sign that they either should be removed or desperately need innovation;
Unexpected use features. Features that are used in a way that is extremely different from what their creators had originally envisioned — a good candidate for slow, continual refinement;
Workhorse features. Features that are heavily used and seem to be working as planned — in which case we ask ourselves whether there is any way to further improve their UX by exploring both the slow iterative process and entirely different innovative concepts in parallel.
The first two buckets are critical for keeping an interface functional and usable, while the latter two are critical for keeping users engaged and delighted. Ideally, we want to reach both goals at the same time, but time, budget and team restrictions have the upper hand.
Still, once a new iteration or a new idea is chosen, it can be tempting to jump into designing or building the new feature right away. But before even thinking about how a feature would fit in an existing interface, it’s a good strategy to validate the idea first — with a quick prototype and user research. A common way to achieve this is by using a quick iterative process, such as Google Ventures’ design sprint20. By iterating within a couple of days, you can identify how the new feature should be implemented and/or whether it’s useful in the way you had imagined it to be initially.
21 In design sprints22, on Monday, you map out the problem; on Tuesday, you sketch solutions; on Wednesday, you build a testable hypothesis; on Thursday, you build a high-fidelity prototype; on Friday, you test.
With design sprints, we expose the idea to usability research early on. In Google Ventures’ methodology, you would test a design with five users a day; then, you would iterate and go through another round of testing of the new design. The reason why all of the same users are involved is because if you test a different design with each user that day, you would have no valid data to know which elements should change. You need a few users to validate one design iteration.
We apply a slightly different model in our sprints. When we start working on a new feature, once an early first prototype is built, we bring designers, developers and the UX team together in the same room, invite real users to test and then iterate on a tight schedule. On the first day, the first testers (two to three people) might be scheduled for a 30-minute interview at 9:00 am, the second group at 11:00 am, the next one at 2:00 pm, and the last one around 4:00 pm. In between user interviews, we have “open time windows,” when we actually iterate on the design and the prototype until at some point we have something viable.
The reason for this is that, early on we want to explore entirely different, sometimes even opposite, directions quickly; once we gather feedback on different interfaces, we can converge towards what feels like the “absolute maximum” interface. We can get very diverse feedback on very diverse design iterations faster this way. The feedback is mostly based on three factors: heat maps that record user clicks, the time users need to complete a task and how delightful the experience is to them. Later in the week, we keep working consistently with a larger number of users, very much like Google does, permanently validating the new design as we go.
So far so good, but sometimes a seemingly innovative new feature collides with an existing feature, and having them both in the same interface would clutter the design. In this case, we explore whether one of the options could be considered an extension of the other. If it could be, then we start by reiterating its functionality and the design. That’s when we have to choose radical redesign or incremental change23. The latter is less risky and will keep a familiar interaction pattern for users, while the former is required if critical changes are impossible to achieve otherwise or if the gains from incremental changes would be too shallow.
In either case, it’s critical to keep the focus on the entire user experience of the product, rather than on the value of a single feature within that product. And once you’ve chosen the feature and you’ve designed and built the first prototype, it’s time to test.
Well, then, how do we effectively prevent errors and failures from creeping into an actual live environment? How many checks and reviews and tests do we run before a feature gets deployed? And in what sequence do we run these tests? In other words, what would the ultimate strategy for rolling out features look like?
24 At Mail.ru, a new feature has to go through seven levels of testing before it sees the light of day. (Video25 and article26 in Russian)
One of the better strategies for rolling out features was proposed27 by Andrew Sumin, head of development at Mail.ru, a major email provider in Russia. The strategy wouldn’t be applicable to every project, but it’s a reasonable and comprehensive approach for companies serving mid-sized and large products to thousands of customers.
Let’s look at the strategy in detail and cover the eight steps of a feature roll-out, covering Mail.ru’s process of product development:
test with developers,
test with real users in a controlled environment,
test with company-wide users,
test with beta testers,
test with users who manually opt in,
split-test and check retention,
release slowly and gradually,
measure the aftermath.
In Mail.ru’s case, the most important feature to keep intact no matter what is composing a message (obviously). That’s the most used piece of the interface, and allowing it to be unavailable or to work incorrectly even for seconds would be absolutely out of the question. So, what if we wanted to extend the functionality of a textarea, perhaps by adding a few smart autocomplete functions, or a counter, or a side preview?
The more time passes by in development, the more expensive it becomes to fix a problem. Again, think about how connected all decisions are in product development; the more refined the product is, the more decisions have to be reverted, costing time and resources. So, identifying and resolving problems early on matters from both a business perspective and a design and development perspective.
You can’t debug an idea, though, so initial testing should take place during production, on the very first prototypes. The first testers at Mail.ru, then, are the developers who actually write the code. The company encourages its employees to use the product for in-house communication (and even private communication); so, developers could be considered hardcore users of the product.
28 Gremlins.js3129 helps you check the robustness of a website by “unleashing a horde of undisciplined gremlins.”
The first step is quite obvious: design and build the feature, and then locally test, review and roll it out on the staging server. This is where QA testing comes in, with comprehensive tools and task runners that attempt to crash the feature and interface30, potentially automated with monkey testing tools such as Gremlins.js3129.
The results are monitored and then fed back into the feedback loop for the next iteration of the feature. At some point, the developers will feel quite confident with the build: the change seems to be working as expected, and the requirements have been met. That’s when real user testing kicks in.
2. Test With Real Users in a Controlled Environment Link
When the first working prototype is finished, the feature is tested with actual users in interviews. Customers are invited to complete tasks, and as they do, the UX team monitors dead ends and issues that pop up and addresses them on spot.
However, not only is the new feature being tested; the usability test’s goal is to ensure that the new feature doesn’t affect critical components of the interface, which is why users complete routine tasks, such as composing a message and opening, replying to and browsing emails in their inbox. If both the new feature and the old features are well understood, the process can move on.
Obviously, the feedback from the usability test prompts developers to introduce changes, which then feed back to the usability testers, going back and forth until the result seems to hold value for a larger audience. The next step, then, is for the feature to be spotlighted within the company: A company-wide email is sent out encouraging all colleagues to check the feature and submit reports, bugs and suggestions in a tracker.
With testing, there isn’t a particularly big difference between users in “remote” departments within the company and users in the wild. Even internal users don’t know what changes to expect or know exactly what a feature does or how it’s supposed to work or look like. The only main difference is that colleagues can be prompted to quickly submit feedback or leave a comment. That’s when voting forms are introduced. Testers can not only play with the feature but also add a comment and upvote or downvote it. Voting has to be weighed against product strategy and business requirements, but if users clearly find a feature useless or helpful, that’s a simple and effective way to gather feedback and to test whether the product works as expected.
If a feature has passed a technical check, a usability check and review within the company, the next logical step is to introduce it to some segments of the audience. However, instead of rolling it out to a random segment of users, the team submits a feature for review among beta testers — users who have opted to participate in tests and submit feedback for experimental features. They can downvote or upvote a feature, as well as report bugs and commit pieces of code.
But how do you choose appropriate beta-testers? Well, if you want to encourage testers to break the interface, you might focus on advanced loyal users with technical skills — users who would be able to provide technical detail about a bug if necessary, and users who know the existing interface well enough to be able to anticipate problems that other users might have.
However, you need criteria to determine whether a user is advanced enough to be a beta tester. In the case of an email client, it could be someone who uses Chrome or Firefox (i.e. they know how to change their default browser), who has created more than three folders in their inbox and who has also installed the mobile app.
Up until this point, the tests have involved a manageable number of users, configurations and test reports. Yet the diversity of users, systems and configurations out in the wild, including operating system, browser, plugins, network settings, antivirus software and other locally installed applications, can be slightly more daunting in scale.
In Mail.ru’s case, the next step is to roll out the feature in a live interface, behind a flag, and to send out an email to this larger segment of active users, presenting the new feature and inviting them to activate it on their own in the interface, usually with a shiny “Update” button. To measure the value of the feature to actual users, the team again uses a voting system, with a few prompts here and there, basically asking users whether they find the feature helpful or useful. Notice that the difference between this level and the previous level is that the manual opt-in involves a much larger audience — many of whom aren’t technical at all, unlike beta testers.
So, timing and coordination matter. You probably wouldn’t pick a random day to send out the email to active users, because you’ll want the customer support team and developers to be available when the stream of bug reports starts coming in. That’s why the email is sent out at the beginning of the week, when all (or most) developers are available and the support team is ready to spring into action, having been briefed and actively connected with the developers via Skype or Slack. In a smaller company, you could even have developers sit in for a few hours at support desks to get to the core of a problem faster by speaking directly to customers.
In the steps thus far, except for usability testing, all testers have used the new feature voluntarily. However, if you enable the feature by default, suddenly users will have to use it, and this is a very different kind of group, one we haven’t tested at all.
To make sure you don’t break the habits of passive users, you could split-test with three small segments of users and measure retention. After all, you want to make sure that a new version works at least as well as the previous one. Identify the most important activity in the interface and measure not only how much time users spend on it before and after the roll-out, but also how much time passes until they return. In Mail.ru’s case, retention entails users checking their email and composing a message. The more often a user comes back, the higher the retention, which is an indicator of a better UX.
Each segment gets a slightly different view, which enables us test how to display the new feature to all users later. For the first segment, we add the new feature and provide a tutorial on how to use it. For the second segment, we just add the new feature. For the third segment, we could leave the feature as is. For all of these segments, we could implement the change at the same time, select a reasonable timeframe to run the test, measure retention and then compare results. The higher the retention of a segment, the more likely that design will be promoted to all users later on.
If a feature has made it all the way to this point, then it probably already works well for a large segment of the audience. This is when you could gradually roll it out to all users — with a voting prompt to gather feedback. If the feedback is mostly positive, you can keep rolling out the feature and it will eventually become an integral part of the interface. Otherwise, you would evaluate the feedback and return to the lab for the next iteration.
Rolling out the feature isn’t enough, though: It has to be communicated to users. A common way to do that is through email and social media. Still, a quick walkthrough tutorial explaining the value of the feature in real-life scenarios might be helpful, too. Also, don’t forget to integrate a suggestions box to gather feedback immediately.
Once the feature has been rolled out, we can monitor how it performs and try different methods to draw attention to it, so that users will be able to perform their tasks more efficiently. You could track the most common tasks or most visited pages and then display a little inline note recommending a slightly smarter and faster way for the user to achieve their goal, and then measure whether the user prefers this new feature or the usual method.
Don’t forget to bring the feedback back to the entire team, not only the developers or designers, so that they are motivated and engaged and see how people use a feature that was initially nothing more than a rough idea. Nothing is more motivating than seeing happy, delighted people using an application exactly the way you envisioned, or in entirely different ways. It will also nourish the growth of the team’s subsequent features.
The review process looks complex and thorough, but sometimes only time and a wide net for user testing will uncover a problem. For example, if a change affects what the overview of incoming messages looks like, no unit test could uncover difficulties that users of assistive software might encounter. In a mail interface, what do you want the accessibility device to read out first: the date, the sender, the subject line or the message itself? The way you rearrange the columns in the overview might change the way users choose to access the information; so, allowing them to turn off the new feature would be critical as well.
So, what does a roll-out strategy look like? You could start by exploring the graph of dependencies to understand how far-reaching your change might be. Then, you could test the feature with developers and with real users in a controlled environment. Then, you could ask colleagues to review the feature, before sending it to a select group of beta testers. Finally, you could make the feature available as an option to users. And, before enabling the feature for everybody, you could run a split-test to figure out the best way to introduce the feature, and then measure the retention rates for critical tasks.
Obviously, deployment is not a linear process. Throughout the process, you might need to take two steps back in order move one step forward — until you finally have a release candidate. The workflow covered above might seem to be quite slow and not particularly agile, but you drastically minimize the risk of users suddenly being confronted with an unexpected problem and having an inferior experience as a result. In some situations, it might be very well worth it.
I had tried Lightroom in the past, but always preferred using Apple’s Aperture photo editing program. But in the spring of 2014, when it was announced that Apple was no longer supporting Aperture, I decided to make the leap to Lightroom. At first I found it difficult to use and not really intuitive, but I soon found my way around and I was a Lightroom convert.
If you are new to Lightroom and don’t know where to start, or have thought about using it but feel overwhelmed, then please know I feel your pain, and know where you’re coming from. I wrote this Beginner’s Guide to Lightroom to help you, and I wish I would have had something like this when I first got started. It’s designed to help you through a few basic steps from opening up Lightroom for the first time, making two basic edits, and exporting (saving) a final version of your picture.
What is Lightroom and what does it do?
In a nutshell, Lightroom is a program that can manage and edit your images. The catch, though, is that it doesn’t really edit your images, or actually manage anything either. Instead, the program works by looking at pictures you have stored on your computer, and allows you to create instructions for how you want to change them.
For example, let’s say you have a photo of a squirrel that’s a bit dark so you want to make it brighter. Lightroom doesn’t touch the original image! It doesn’t move it, copy it, rename it, or change it in any way. Instead Lightroom, is a non-destructive editing program, that allows you make changes to a preview or thumbnail version of the picture, which means you can see what the final image will look like after you make it brighter. When you are finished with your editing you export (or save as) a final image from Lightroom (again leaving the original file completely un-touched) and voilá, you now have a second, much brighter photo, to print or share with others.
The Lightroom catalog is like a recipe book
Lightroom stores a record of all the changes you want to make to your images in a separate file called the Catalog, which is stored independent from your pictures. The best analogy I can think of is that of a kitchen: your original pictures are kind of like the raw ingredients in your cupboards, and the Lightroom Catalog is like a recipe book. Lightroom doesn’t do anything to your ingredients (your original files), but instead saves the instructions for transforming your supplies into actual finished products (in this case output edited images), just like recipes for your photos. When you are finished, your original image files still remain, but you have a new creation (i.e. an edited picture) that you can share with others.
The Importance of Adobe Camera Raw
Before we get too deep into the weeds here, it’s important to back up a bit and look at another program called Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), which allows you to perform all sorts of edits and changes to your Raw images – from simply making them brighter or darker, to selectively editing colors, or working with curves. You may already have it on your computer and not even know it, and it’s actually the engine that powers everything Lightroom does in terms of editing your images. Every change, adjustment, and tweak you do to one of your photos in Lightroom, is actually being done by ACR. Understanding how this fits in might seem a bit extraneous to the overall Lightroom discussion, but it’s important to know how all it works together if you want to make sense of Lightroom itself.
You and Lightroom: best buds for life.
Opening Lightroom for the First Time
When I initially launched my copy of Lightroom four years ago, things started to go south within a matter of seconds. It asked me about making a Catalog, and wanted to know where to store it, and I started channeling my inner Gob Bluth while muttering to myself, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” If this sounds like you, don’t worry – there’s really not much going on here that you need to worry about, and everything will be fine. Remember the kitchen analogy I mentioned earlier? All your computer wants to know right now is where to store the Catalog, or recipe book, that it will use to keep track of the changes you want to make to your pictures. You will need to create a new Catalog, and specify its location on your hard drive. I just keep mine within my Pictures folder.
Lightroom wants to know where you would like to store its Catalog, or database of edits you want to make to pictures. If you’re not sure what to do here, just click the “Continue” button.
Some people are very specific about where they want this Catalog to be located, and professional photographers will often have multiple image collections and many catalogs as well. Honestly, if you just want to figure out how to use Lightroom you can just click the “Continue” button and go about your business. For casual photographers the exact location of the Catalog file is not all that important, so don’t sweat it.
Note: do not store your catalog on an external hard drive though, it will not run optimally or may not run at all. Keep it on your computer’s main drive. If in doubt just click Continue as noted above.
In terms of new-user-confusion, the next screen (the Library module) you see is not much better. Upon encountering it for the first time I felt like someone had quashed my photography enthusiasm with a scary dull grey veil. There are a few tutorial hints that pop up in the middle, which aren’t very helpful, and after you dismiss them you’re left staring at an empty dark wasteland, wondering why you didn’t just stick to using Instagram filters like everyone else.
If this screen doesn’t make a new user run screaming from Lightroom, I don’t know what would.
What you’re looking at here is your entire library of photos, but it’s empty because none have actually been imported yet. There’s plenty of other options and buttons here as well – enough to confuse even the most experienced user – so for now just ignore the Catalog/Folders/Collections stuff on the left side, and all those Quick Develop options on the right side. And for heaven’s sake, don’t give a second thought to those strange chessboard-like icons at the bottom. Just take a breath, grab your memory card and your favorite beverage, and get ready to import some photos. Plug your memory card into your computer, then click the “Import” button in the lower-left corner to start transferring your pictures over to your hard drive. You can also import photos that are already sitting on your computer, but for now I want to focus on the kind of workflow you might encounter, as a photographer who just wants to figure out this program.
Importing Photos
The first thing you see once you have your memory card connected is a grid with tiny thumbnail previews of all the pictures on your memory card.
Note: You can also connect to your camera directly – however, it’s a better idea to use a card reader then plug in your camera directly. If the camera battery dies during import you can crash the card and damage or lose your images.
There are all sorts of options on this screen, but if you just want to get the basics down, here’s what you need to look at:
At the top of your screen, select the option that says “Copy.” This will, as you may guess, copy the pictures over to your computer, and add them to the Lightroom catalog so you can make edits to them later.
On the right-hand side you have to choose a Destination so the program knows where to put the original photos on your computer. You can select a specific destination or just let Lightroom figure this out for you. You can also do things like rename your pictures as they are imported, apply specific edits (called “Develop Settings”) to all of them, or give them keywords such as “Wedding” or “Camping.” For now don’t worry about any of this, and I promise everything will be just fine.
Choose which pictures to import by making sure they have checkmarks in the top corner of each thumbnail preview. They should all be checked by default (if they aren’t just click Check All), but if there are any images you don’t want to import, you can just un-check the box next to them.
When you’re all set, click the Import button in the lower-right corner of your screen. Your computer will beep or chime when everything is done, and you’ll be ready to start editing your photos!
Organizing and Developing (Processing)
After your photos are imported things start to get really crazy, but once again just try to ignore all the new things that show up on the side of your screen, and focus on just a few of the essentials. First of all, don’t start making edits or changes to your pictures just yet.
Instead, look at the left side of your screen and find an area called “Collections.” Remember that Lightroom doesn’t actually do anything with the original pictures. When you clicked Import, it copied them over to a folder on your hard drive where they will remain, intact and untouched, until the end of time. What you can do is organize the pictures into Collections within Lightroom itself, in order to keep track of them more easily. Collections function just like playlists in iTunes or Spotify, and allow you to sort photos manually or automatically, based on how you want them to fit together. Click the + button on the right side to make a new Collection (i.e. Playlist), Smart Collection (where sorts your photos automatically based on criteria you specify) or Collection Set (a folder containing multiple Collections). Once you have a Collection created you can populate it by dragging and dropping your photos over to it, just like in iTunes. During this process the original images stay exactly where they are on your hard drive, you are just using Collections to help manage them a little easier.
Read more on collections and organizing here: How to Organize Your Photos in Lightroom
Once you have your images sorted into Collections it’s time to start editing them. (Or you can start editing without doing any sorting at all. It’s up to you.) Click the “Develop” option in the top-right corner of your screen to begin making changes (or click D on your keyboard). At first I was put off and confused by the term Develop, but Adobe used it to hearken back to the days of darkrooms and analog film photography. (which some photographers still use even today). Before digital cameras you had to actually get your film developed before you could see your pictures, and that’s essentially what Lightroom is trying to emulate here in the Develop module. If it doesn’t make sense to you yet, just pretend it says “Edit” instead of “Develop” and you’ll be fine.
You are now in the Develop module, which is one of seven different working states available inside Lightroom, the rest being: Library (which you started in), Map, Book, Slideshow, Print, and Map. I ignore all the others, and spend about 98% of my time in either Library or Develop, and as a new user I would recommend the same for you.
At first when you click on the Develop module it might not seem like anything is different, but look again and you will see that all the metadata information that was on the right-hand side of your screen has been replaced with a series of panels like Basic, Tone Curve, Lens Corrections, and more. Don’t start hyperventilating! I promise this is easier than it may seem at first. There are a metric ton of tutorials and web pages online devoted to helping you understand the Develop module, but right now I just want you to focus on two simple things: Cropping and Exposure.
One of the most basic edits many people do, is to trim them down so just the important parts are in the frame, and get rid of things along the edge like trees, trash cans, bystanders, and the like. To do this click the square icon under the colorful graph called the Histogram, (or use the keyboard shortcut R) and you will see a nifty overlay appear on your image that you can use to crop it down how you want. Also read: How Cropping in Post-Production Can Improve Composition
Use the corners of the rectangle overlay to crop your picture down so it contains only what you want, then when you are done press the [enter] or [return] key to see the results. Remember what I said earlier about Lightroom being nondestructive? It might look like you have just removed part of your photo, but the original is entirely untouched, and remains fully intact on your computer. What you are actually editing here is a placeholder – a preview of what the final image will look like – not the actual image itself. None of your edits in Lightroom are permanent, and you can reverse or undo any editing decision you make, so don’t be afraid to play around with it, kick the tires, and just start trying things even if you’re not entirely sure what the result will be.
But your original file remains uncropped on your computer – Lightroom only shows how it will look if you apply this setting.
The other common edit that people make to their images is adjusting the brightness, often to fix an image that is too over or under-exposed. This can easily be done with the top panel on the right side of the Develop module, appropriately titled “Basic.” Look for the slider called “Exposure” and move it to the right or left in order to make your picture brighter or darker.
Once again you will notice the changes you make reflected on the picture you see, but keep in mind you are not actually editing the original photo. Your instructions to crop, brighten, or otherwise change the picture are being stored in the Catalog file, while the original remains untouched. At this point you can go ahead and experiment with all the other options, tools, and sliders you see in the Develop module and take note of how they alter your photo. Even if you are not at all sure of what is happening just remember that Lightroom is nondestructive so you may as well play around with things to your heart’s content, since your original pictures will never be altered, and are safe.
Read more on the basic editing tools and sliders here:
Understanding the Basic Sliders in Adobe Camera Raw
Exporting (Save As)
Once you have made all the changes to a picture that you want, it’s time to export the final photo. This is again where the cooking analogy may come in handy, since this step is similar to putting your cake, casserole, or quiche, in the oven so it can bake. You still have the original ingredients on your counter and in your pantry, but once your timer beeps you will have an entirely new creation based on the recipe you used.
In Lightroom you edit photos instead of making pastries or pies, and the Export step is when you put them in your virtual oven to be processed. You may also think of this as opening up a document or spreadsheet, making some changes, and then choosing “Save As” instead of “Save.” This leaves the original document intact while creating a new one with your changes, much like exporting a picture in Lightroom leaves your original image as it was, and gives you a new edited version, complete with all the edits you made.
When you are ready to export a photo or multiple photos, select the ones you want while in the Library or Develop module and choose “File > Export”, which will bring up yet another confusing dialog box filled with head-spinning options and choices. Hopefully by now you are getting a little more used to this sort of thing when using Lightroom, but if not just focus on a few specific items on this screen.
On the left side you will see a few presets for exporting your photos, depending on whether you want to print them, email them, etc. You can also create your own presets for exporting, but for now don’t worry about that and just focus on a few specific settings.
Once you get the hang of the Export box you can create your own presets for saving pictures with specific parameters that you choose.
If you’re not sure which option to choose, start with “Full-Sized JPEGs” and then modify things just a bit by tweaking a couple settings (make sure Export To: is set to Hard Drive at the top of the box). Then find and adjust the following:
File Settings – Choose “JPEG” as the Image Format, set the quality slider to 85, and Color Space to sRGB.
Image Sizing – Tick off “Resize to Fit” then choose “Width & Height” and then enter 2048 in both the W (Width) and H (Height) boxes, (make sure it says “Pixels after Height, not In or Cm.). Leave the rest of the parameters alone.
Post-Processing – make sure After Export is set to: Show in Finder (or Show in Windows Explorer if you use a PC).
These settings will give you pictures that are large enough to print up to about 5×7″ size, or share on social media sites, (for email use a slightly smaller size like 1200 or 800px). When you’re ready, click the “Export” button in the lower right corner and you’re all set. As long as you did the last part, Lightroom will open a Finder (or Windows Explorer) window showing you all your new images, and where they are on your harddrive. Lightroom will probably save the edited copies of your pictures to your Desktop (the default) but you can double check this using the “Export Location” option (at the top of the box) in the Export pop-up box if you want.
The original photo was okay, but Lightroom helped me coax much more detail, color, and vibrance out of it.
Let’s Review
This all seems like a lot, but hopefully if you have made it this far, you now have a good understanding of a very basic Lightroom workflow. If you take away nothing else from this tutorial, remember these few precious nuggets of wisdom:
Lightroom does not edit your original images. They will always remain wherever you put them, and Lightroom does not change them in any way.
You are looking at preview versions when you are editing your photos in Lightroom, and not the actual images themselves.
A complete record of edits to your photos is kept in a database called the Catalog. Think of this like a recipe book, where you have instructions for how to cook your images, but you are not altering the original ingredients in the kitchen.
The editing process is not complete until you Export your images, which saves a new copy of your photos, complete with the changes you made in Lightroom.
I hope this Beginner’s Guide to Lightroom was helpful. Please leave any thoughts or questions in the comments section below. Good luck, and feel free to share some of your favorite images that you have edited in Lightroom too!
Planning for retirement can get complicated when you’re trying to get the most out of your money. Fees for transactions, financial analysis, and simple poor investments can eat away at your savings. John Oliver’s latest video explains many of the things to watch for.
As the video points out, services that advertise “financial advisors” can be worse for you if they’re packing in a ton of hidden fees. Managed investments also mean that a person is trying to make guesses to beat the market but, as is too often the case, they can fail costing you money in the long run.
The simplest thing to do is, as we’ve said a million times before, invest in low-cost index funds. Index funds try to match the market, instead of beating it. You won’t race ahead of everyone else to become a millionaire, but you’re also way less likely to end up blowing away your returns on fees for financial advice you might not even need.
Many people have said or written that while Donald Trump supports the Second Amendment, talk is cheap, and we do not have actions to back up the talk. There is some truth in that. Trump doesn’t have a legislative record to show actions to back up his words. But words have meaning. If a nominee is unwilling to give us words in support of the Second Amendment, why should we believe that he will go to bat for us in the executive branch, the legislature, or in the courts?
If the nominee is too concerned with being politically correct when running for office, even in the primary, why should we believe that they will be willing to take more heat while in office, facing re-election, or under media pressure?
If a nominee will not specifically defend the Second Amendment verbally and in writing before being elected, why would we expect them to do so afterwards?
Here is the record of Republican nominees over the last hundred years to see how they compared with Donald Trump.
The Second Amendment was not an issue before 1968. In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt had pushed through the first serious federal gun control law. It impacted few people at first. It only had an effect on machine guns, short barreled shotguns and rifles, and silencers that crossed state lines in interstate commerce. Most people paid little attention to the onerous regulations and taxes that were imposed. There were few prosecutions.
Even as late as 1964 Barry Goldwater, when he spoke of the Second Amendment, spoke of it in the context of hunting. From scribd.com:
Goldwater:
At a young age, Barry Goldwater was taught by his mother how to shoot rifles and shotguns.
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He believed that gun control was “impossible,” and served as an NRA spokesman, appearing incommercials for the group. He was also an avid gun collector, devoting an entire room of his houseto a variety of guns that he had both made and purchased over the years.
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Goldwater was, however, opposed to the sale of automatic firearms:”I’m completely opposed to selling automatic rifles. I don’t see any reason why they ever madesemi-automatics. I’ve been a member of the NRA, I collect, make and shoot guns. I’ve never usedan automatic or semiautomatic for hunting. There’s no need to. They have no place in anybody’sarsenal. If any S.O.B. can’t hit a deer with one shot, then he ought to quit shooting.”
Richard Nixon personally hated guns. He likely approved of GCA 1968. From ontheissues.org:
Twenty years ago, I asked Richard Nixon what he thought of gun control. His on-the-record reply: “Guns are an abomination.” Free from fear of gun owners’ retaliation at the polls, he favored making handguns illegal and requiring licenses for hunting rifles.
FORD: The record of gun control, whether it’s in one city or another or in some States does not show that the registration of a gun, handgun, or the registration of the gun owner has in any way whatsoever decreased the crime rate or the use of that gun in the committing of a crime. The record just doesn’t prove that such legislation or action by a local city council is effective. What we have to do–and this is the crux of the matter–is to make it very difficult for a person who uses a gun in the commission of a crime to stay out of jail. I don’t believe in the registration of handguns or the registration of the handgun owner. That has not proven to be effective. And, therefore, the better way is to go after the criminal, the individual who commits a crime in the possession of a gun and uses that gun for a part of his criminal activity.
But, Gerald Ford proposed a ban on a whole class of guns:
I had always opposed federal registration of guns or the licensing of gun owners, and as President, I hadn’t changed my views. At the same time, I recognized that handguns had played a key role in the increase of violent crime. Not all handguns-just those that hadn’t been designed for sporting purposes. I asked Congress to ban the manufacture and sale of these “Saturday night specials.”
Ronald Reagan was not a firm supporter of the Second Amendment in his words. From ontheissues.org:
[In a 1991 speech, Reagan said]: “I’m a member of the NRA. And my position on the right to bear arms is well known. But I support the Brady bill and I urge the Congress to enact it without delay. It’s just plain common sense that there be a waiting period [7 days] to allow local law enforcement officials to conduct background checks on those who wish to buy a handgun.”
The Brady bill was opposed by the current President, George H.W. Bush. “I don’t think it would be proper for me or any other ex-president to stand and tell an acting president what he should or shouldn’t do,” Reagan said. But then he added: “I happen to believe in the Brady Bill because we have the same thing in California right now.”
He was asked why he had opposed all gun-control measures while he was President. He shook his head. “I was against a lot of the ridiculous things that were proposed with regard to gun control.
George Bush Sr. was at best a lukewarm supporter of the Second Amendment.
Bush exacted his revenge in May 1995, when he read about an NRA fund-raising letter that described federal agents as “jack-booted thugs”. Ripping up his NRA membership card, Bush wrote a letter of resignation, which his office made public. He accused the NRA of slandering dedicated officials “who are out there day and night laying their lives on the line for all of us.”
Robert Dole was lukewarm on the Second Amendment.
George Dubya Bush was lukewarm at best. He promised to sign the extension of the “assault weapon” ban if it reached his desk:
BUSH: I did think we ought to extend the assault weapons ban and was told the bill was never going to move. I believe law-abiding citizens ought to be able to own a gun. I believe in background checks. The best way to protect our citizens from guns is to prosecute those who commit crimes with guns.
John McCain was somewhat pro-Second Amendment in his 2008 campaign. From ontheissues.com:
McCain opposes restrictions on so-called “assault rifles” and voted consistently against such bans.
McCain opposes bans on the importation of certain types of ammunition magazines and has voted against such limitations.
McCain believes that banning ammunition is just another way to undermine Second Amendment rights. He voted against an amendment that would have banned many of the most commonly used hunting cartridges on the spurious grounds that they were “armor-piercing.”
I was surprised to see that Senator McCain had some positive positions on Second Amendment issues. His actions were far less supportive.
Mitch Romney was lukewarm on the Second Amendment at best. From ontheissues.org:
ROMNEY: Yeah, I’m not in favor of new pieces of legislation on guns and taking guns away or making certain guns illegal. We of course don’t want to have automatic weapons, and that’s already illegal in this country, to have automatic weapons. What I believe is we have to do is to make enormous efforts to enforce the gun laws that we have and to change the culture of violence we have. And you ask, how are we going to do that? Good schools, to give people the hope and opportunity they deserve, and perhaps less violence from that. But let me mention another thing. And that is parents. We need moms and dads helping raise kids.
Let us compare these remarks to Donald Trump’s on the Second Amendment. From ammoland.com:
“The Trump family will stay vigilant in our support of right to keep and bear arms. And given today’s threats across the United States it is as important now as ever. National Security begins in our homes. All citizens must have the ability to protect themselves, their families, and their property. The Second Amendment is a right, not a privilege. Our safety and defense is embodied in the Second Amendment and I will always protect this most important right.
Not only does Donald Trump support the Second Amendment with stronger and clearer language, he goes into specifics of what he is going to do to help restore the Second Amendment. He often talks about how the Second Amendment is needed for self defense, a topic no other Republican Nominee would touch. From cnn.com:
TRUMP: — I promise there wouldn’t have been 130 people killed and hundreds of people lying in the hospital to this day. It might not have happened. Because if they knew there were guns in the room, it might not have happened. But if it did, you would have had bullets going in the opposite direction. And believe me, the carnage would not have been the same by any stretch of the imagination.
Trump supports the carry of concealed weapons all over the country with national reciprocity: From the Washington Times:
Mr. Trumpmade the arguments in a “position paper” on the Second Amendment in which he makes the case that people who don’t break the law should be able to obtain a concealed carry permit allowing them to carry in every state, and that members of the military should be able to carry their arms on military bases and at recruitment centers.
Donald Trump support doing away with federal gun free zones: from cnn.com:
And this whack-job walks in and starts shooting and killed all five of them. Gun-free zones. We are getting rid of gun-free zones. OK? I can tell you.
“I do not support expanding background checks. The current background checks do not work.”
“They make it more difficult for law abiding citizens to acquire firearms while consistently failing to stop criminals from getting guns. We should re-examine our policy to make sure that these prohibitions do not impede law abiding citizens from exercising their Second Amendment rights.”
Donald Trump compares his position to Hillary Clinton’s. From cnn.com:
But Hillary Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment. We are not talking about change it. She wants to abolish the Second Amendment. We’re not going to let that happen. I can tell you. That we’re going to preserve it. We’re going to cherish it. We’re going to take care of it. OK? They keep chipping away. They talk about the magazines, they talk about the bullets. We’re going to take care of it.
This is another major difference from previous Republican nominees. None of them talked about the incremental attacks on the Second Amendment.
Donald Trump has supported the Second Amendment more forcefully and more specifically than any Republican nominee to date. He has not been in office, so we cannot measure his support with his actions. If he puts into practice even 20% of his proposals to restore Second Amendment rights, he will have done more for the Second Amendment than the last four Republican presidents altogether.
His proposals are strongly supported in Congress. The Congress voted down Universal Background Checks. They voted for national reciprocity. They showed support for an end to many gun free zones, such as in the Post Office and on Army Corps of Engineers managed lands. As Commander in Chief, Trump would not need Congress to end gun free zones in the military.
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of constitutional carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and recently retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.
Top Shot Champion Chris Cheng shares a simple process that can help shooters of all levels diagnose some common accuracy problems. Firearm instructors and experienced shooters are encouraged to watch and share these tips with newcomers to the shooting sports.
Also, check out Chris’ new book, “Shoot to Win: Tips, Tactics and Techniques to Help You Shoot Like a Pro”.
Filmed at the Richmond Rod & Gun Club in Richmond, CA. (NSSF Video)
We told you yesterday about the officer-involved shooting during a domestic violence incident at Dallas’s Love Field airport. A man identified as Shawn Nicholas Diamond began destroying his girlfriend’s car, smashing the glass of the vehicle with a traffic cone and large rocks before officers responded.
We now have security camera video of the incident from multiple angles, and what stuns me the most isn’t Diamond’s attack on the vehicle nor the officer’s eventual shooting of Diamond, but the obliviousness of the other people in the area who utterly refused to face the reality that they were in a very dangerous situation where they could easily find themselves injured or killed.
I’d suggest watching the video below twice: one time to see the conflicts between Diamond and his ex-girlfriend transitioning into a confrontation between Diamond and responding officers that led to his being shot, and the second time to notice the numerous citizens standing in close proximity to both the domestic violence attack and then the attack on the officer
Amazingly, other people near the domestic violence attack all but ignored the threat of the enraged Diamond attacking the vehicle. They either simply watched him continue his frenzied attack from yards away where he could just as easily have turned his rage on them, or they seemingly pretended that nothing was going on.
Here are some choice screen captures from the security camera footage.
The man in the white SUV was well aware of Diamond’s attack on his girlfriend’s car, having stopped to watch it briefly. Amazingly, he decides to ignore the potential threat. Even as officers arrive and draw their weapons, he decides to unload bags from the back of his SUV. Incredibly, the woman in the black SUV opens her door and gets out of her vehicle to get a better view of the attack on the vehicle just feet in front of her. She stands there even as the officer draws his gun on Diamond. It isn’t until the officer apparently yells at these people that the man runs from his SUV, and the woman gets back into her vehicle.
Lemmings have better self-defense instincts.
We then go to a different camera view, which is a bit dark because of the shadows. Diamond is on the lower center left of this camera view, the handgun-armed officer is in the middle center of the sidewalk, and what appears to be an officer with a taser drawn stands near the curb. Amazingly, people well aware that officers have their weapons drawn on a non-compliant individual just stand there and watch the dangerous confrontation going down right in front of them. One man is standing in front of a car by the curb. At least three more bystanders are right behind the officer with the drawn handgun. Diamond’s girlfriend is at the bottom of the frame, almost in the line of fire, transfixed.
No one is seeking cover or is attempting to move away from a very dangerous situation.
Four shots ring out as Diamond moves to rush the officer. Diamond collapses to the pavement. Amazingly, even after shots ring out, not a single soul has the instincts for self-preservation to run away from a still-active shooting in process. They cringe, and one or two take a few halting steps, but they’re all basically frozen. Diamond’s ex-girlfriend is the only one who takes more than a step, and she’s only slowly walking away in disbelief as Diamond attempts to rise and rush the officer a second time, resulting in five more shots being fired.
Here’s another video taken by another civilian who didn’t have the good sense to seek cover.
You’ll notice one or two women with the good sense to move away from the scene at the first sounds of gunfire. Amazingly, most people simply stood there, even though they had no idea what was going on, and few people were actually stupid enough to close in and get a better look as shots were still being fired!
What can we learn from this? A number of things.
Humans are slaves to their routines. They will often not deviate from normal behavior even in the face of obvious threats to their lives… and there’s a reason for this.
Think of your brain as a computer, and your daily routines as pre-programmed software routines. You’ve been programmed your entire life to act a certain way in civil society. When people run into situations far outside their areas of experience, many freeze up when they can’t readily access a program on how to handle that new situation.
They typically “lock up” in one of two ways. They either ignore the new situation and run a pre-programmed routine they do understand, such as the man continuing to unload luggage from his SUV, or they freeze until they can gather enough data to figure out what to do next. The woman who got out of her SUV in an attempt to process more data and formulate a response, and the dozen of more witnesses who either just stood there watching or who moved closer to the scene of the threat manifested this response.
Folks, people are often nothing more than stupid computers made of meat.
So what can we learn from this?
It’s simple: think about the kinds of possible (even improbable) scenarios and develop pre-programmed responses to threats. In this instance, seeing a crazed man smashing a car with large rocks should immediately trigger a response of, “get the heck away from there.”
Once officers arrived and drew their weapons, the pre-programmed response should be, “move away as fast as possible and find cover.”
We often talk about situational awareness, but that’s generally a load of crap. More than a dozen people in this incident had an awareness that something was going on. What they didn’t have was a pre-existing plan for how to deal with a dangerous incident.
As we’ve noted numerous times in the past, you will not rise to the occasion. Not one of the dozens of people standing around here did. What you will do is default your level of training.
Get good training and have a plan, folks. The next time something like this happens, the bad guy might be sending rounds downrange, too.