“In this new open-source/cluetrain world, I am a marketer. And so are you. If you’re interested in creating passionate users, or keeping your job, or breathing life into a startup, or getting others to contribute to your open source project, or getting your significant other to agree to the vacation you want to go on… congratulations. You’re in marketing.”

Henry Dreyfuss, who wrote the industrial design classic Designing for People, includes marketing as part of what designers do:

“We bear in mind that the object being worked on is going to be ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated, or in some other way used by people individually or en masse.

When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed.

On the other hand if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient—or just plain happier—by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.

It it interesting that Dreyfuss would include the words “more eager to purchase”, which is certainly not a widely-agreed-upon task of most designers. This is most often relegated to another part of the company. While Dreyfuss was focusing on industrial design (the building of physical products) he was writing in the 50s, before virtual products/software were around. So, can we apply this notion to web application design as well?

We chatted about this idea during a talk I gave to the NHUPA folks last night in Portsmouth. One interesting supposition bubbled up…when designers are tasked with selling their product they make better products. When they are not tasked with selling their product they have less responsibility, and thus aren’t forced into getting feedback on what they’re making. It’s that feedback you get from selling, from your success/failure at marketing, which pushes back positively into the design process. Of course, this idea of marketing is different than the common one of a snake-oil salesman…

So do you buy that idea? Do you think designers are also marketers? Should they be?

The other morning I changed my about section here on Bokardo to this:

“Bokardo is a blog about interface design for social web sites and applications. I write about recommendation systems, identity, ratings, privacy, comments, profiles, tags, reputation, sharing, as well as the social psychology underlying our motivation to use (or not use) these things. If this sounds interesting to you, grab my RSS Feed.”

This rewrite is an attempt to be as descriptive as possible. I need to explain exactly what I’m doing so that people who are new to the site know what they’re in for. I’m also giving people something to do with this information, asking them to grab my RSS feed if they find those topics interesting. If I can do this, then I’ve had a positive interaction with them.

Worrying about words might seem like a trifle, but from an interface design standpoint words are everything. If there is one thing I’ve learned as an interface designer, it’s that words are absolutely the most important part of interface design. If you don’t have the right words on the screen, you better hope you’re building a porn site.

To prove this, try to get rid of the words in your interface and see if people can use them. One thing you’ll find is how useless they are. This might lead us to believe that we need more useful graphics…and in general I think we do…but graphics can’t do the bulk of the work. Text must handle that job.

In her recent book Letting Go of the Words, Ginny Redish, who has been working on the web and building usable software as long as anyone, writes:

“People don’t come to the web to linger over the words. Most uses of the web are for gathering information or doing tasks, not for the pleasure of reading.”

This is exactly the mindset that most interface designers need. Now, there will certainly be exceptions to this, but the vast majority of people just need to know the basic facts.

1. What is this?
2. What good can it do me?
3. How do I get that good to happen?

Other nuggets that Ginny talks about in depth:

• Write in the inverted pyramid style, leading with the main point
• Use bullets to help focus people on the steps you want them to perform
• Layer information, with periodic calls to action to grab people as they gain momentum
• Use questions in headers, which allows people to graze information and read what they need to
• Think about your writing from an information level, not a document level

The book the most solid reference I’ve seen on these topics. Don’t be dismayed at the book’s odd cover and somewhat disjointed page design…the content, as Ginny would tell you, is what you’re coming for.

I haven’t read the whole book yet, but the sections I have read lead me to believe that this book could be the most important web design book since Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.

In other words, I highly recommend Letting Go of the Words.

Doc Searls has a wonderful post on his long-time meme: The Live Web.

What I like about Doc is that he knows words matter. So when he talks about the Web he uses specific words and phrases that frame discussion.

He says that when people treat their web sites like buildings, when they treat them as something to visit, then they become static and end up not worth visiting. It’s like a museum you’ve been to before…it gets old pretty quick if the exhibits don’t change.

But when people treat web sites like an environment, an ecosystem where human activity occurs, then people come and participate when they need to do the activity, your architecture being a place to do things as opposed to something to look at or experience.

If all you want is people to visit you, you’re not asking for much and will not get much for asking.

The essence of Stewart Brand’s book How Buildings Learn is an observation that the most successful buildings are ones that adapt to the changing activity of their inhabitants. This should be obvious, right? But it’s not, because we treat architecture as unchanging…we’re usually not around long enough (or paying enough attention) to notice the change.

This dichotomy also brings to mind Jesse James Garrett’s original 2000 diagram (PDF) in which he compared the “web as software interface” (task-oriented) with the “web as hypertext system” (information-oriented).

This is the distinction between a web of pages and a web of applications. What’s increasingly clear to me is that applications are becoming primary…even hypertext systems of slowly changing web pages (like Wikipedia, corporate web sites, and Apple support documentation) are now merely repositories of documents for information-organization applications like Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, blogs, and even themselves in many cases. Without an application to remember, organize, favorite, share, and filter what you’ve found, hypertext systems are not that useful. This is why directory sites like Yahoo and browser bookmarks were very early features of the Web, as they reduced the need to remember where everything was.

Serendipity, the much admired quality of browsing, is much more successful when you know what someone has already done…give me recommendations based not just on chance, not just on the fact that I’m walking past, but based on what you know about me and where I’ve been. Amazon is the example…not so much a product information space as a souped-up personalized shopping application.

We are building a web of tools. Tools that augment us, tools that help us organize what we’ve done, filter out what we don’t want, allowing us to pay attention to ever-specific topics with greater fidelity. We don’t need to “go somewhere” every time we want to know about something: that’s a constraint of physical space. If we can bring it back with us, or at least save a URL, then we have it with us at all times. This completely changes the game we’re playing. The challenge becomes to comprehend it all, not to remember where or when. Memory is the computer’s job…our brains for making sense.

We can watch the creation, growth, maturity, and death of opinion on Twitter Search. We can watch as we build evidence for something within our Del.icio.us bookmarks. We can watch our own interests change in our Amazon book list. We can watch public opinion sway back and forth at FiveThirtyEight. These applications are not trifles. They are the future.

This is a long way from static architecture. The very value of this ecosystem is that we can observe the only constant is change. We are building tools for watching the world change…

As Doc says:

“The Web isn’t just real estate. It’s a habitat, an environment, an ever-increasingly-connected place where fecundity rules, vivifying business, culture and everything else that thrives there. It is alive.”

Quite some time back I argued that Information Architecture was the wrong frame in which to approach design. My post got a lot of push-back from the established IA crowd, who claimed that I was either wrong or claimed that my view was just rehashing existing debate. I probably deserved this push-back because I really had no idea what arena I was entering or what sacred cows I was actually attempting to kill. After talking with many folks afterward, it was clear to me that this debate has been around for a looooong time. Apparently the forces of interaction design have been facing off against the forces of information architecture in an epic battle for quite some time. I was flying a flag I didn’t know I was flying.

Thankfully, I didn’t burn too many bridges. I attended my first IA Summit this past April and found it quite enjoyable…in fact everyone I talked to had a strong opinion about it no matter what side they come down on.

Anyway, the conversations I’ve had since seem to prove one thing right: that the issue of how to frame design is an important one, no matter what you believe. In a piece written a few months after mine, Peter Morville agrees that framing is important, and actually seems to agree that IA isn’t always the right frame.

Morville includes a brilliant quote from George Lakoff, the Berkeley professor well-known for his ideas on framing:

“Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions…Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.”

This is the gist of framing, and it is applicable to every part of life. Lakoff recently wrote a piece about how Barack Obama could reframe his campaign messages concerning John McCain. Lakoff’s underlying point is that the way we talk about things affects the way we think about them, and ultimately the way we do them.

Lately I’ve been arguing that the activity is a good frame for design. I started fleshing this out in my book, but admittedly it wasn’t as deep as I wanted to go. I believe that thinking about design from an activity-centric viewpoint is the most efficient way to get where you need to go…which is to create a piece of software that is valuable to people.

This, like my argument about IA being the wrong frame, is not a new idea. In fact, activity theory has roots going back quite far, and lots of HCI publications are putting forth articles on activity-centered design. But it’s still academic, as far as I can tell. In 2005, Don Norman published Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful in ACM Interactions magazine, which turns out to be as much a screed against human-centered-design as it is a positive piece about activity-centered design.

Norman says:

“Many of the systems that have passed through HCD design phases and usability reviews are superb at the level of the static, individual display, but fail to support the sequential requirements of the underlying tasks and activities. The HCD methods tend to miss this aspect of behavior: Activity-centered methods focus upon it.”

Norman makes the case for activity-centered design by looking at everyday objects and suggesting that few in-depth studies of users helped create what they are…instead they evolved over time as people used them. Read any of the works of Henry Petroski to get an insight into the evolution of designs in this way…he writes a lot about how tools like forks and knives evolved over time and use.

Larry Constantine also wrote about activity-centered design in Designing Web Applications for Use. Constantine echoes Norman’s argument by also explaining further how user-centered design can be harmful.

“Focusing on activity and use is not a retreat to the bad old days of technology-centered, inside-out design in which developers arrogantly assumed they knew what was best and threw it at users. It is just an easy way to avoid the pitfalls of human-centered design without giving up its advantages. In the final analysis, understanding your users as people is far less important than understanding them as participants in activities.”

I agree with both Norman and Constantine, but I’m not convinced by them alone. I think we need more evidence that activity-centered design is indeed a good frame. In writing the book and pushing further on the matter in recent talks and discussions, I’m more convinced than ever that this is an avenue worth pursuing. To that end, I’ve been showing the following list when I give presentations, a list of sites and the activities they support.

• Amazon: shopping
• Dogster: taking care of dogs
• Ravelry: knitting & crocheting
• PatientsLikeMe: treating disease
• Upcoming: managing events
• YouTube: sharing videos
• Remember The Milk: keeping to-do lists
• Del.icio.us: bookmarking
• eBay: auctioning
• Netflix: watching movies
• Last.fm: listening to music
• Burdastyle: sewing
• Bigtent: group management
• Flickr: sharing photos

This list is a small one, but it shows how most popular web applications can easily be described in terms of the primary activity they support. I’m sure if you go down through your favorite sites you’ll find it very easy to do the same exercise.

More interestingly is how you can map almost every single feature in these applications to the primary activity. In How Social is Amazon? I pointed out how most of Amazon’s features are like this: each one directly supports the activity of shopping (made up of the actions of choosing an item and purchasing it) A simple rule of thumb: if it doesn’t support the primary activity, it’s not a good feature!

So…to summarize.

1. Framing is important, as it changes the way we think about design and ultimately how we actually do design.
2. Activity-centered design is about framing design in terms of human activity, unlike user-centered design which frames design in terms of the specific people who will use it or information architecture which frames design in terms of information.
3. It’s easy to show how much of the software we use daily can be recast in terms of supporting a primary activity, which suggests that this is a valuable frame for the design process.

So there’s a start on the subject…I would love to start a dialog about what you’re currently finding useful in your design practices…what’s working/not working for you?

Design for Sign-Up: How to Motivate People To Sign Up For Your Web App

There is also a one-page version for easier reading/printing, which you can find here: http://www.peachpit.com/articles/printerfriendly.aspx?p=1216150

Enjoy!

• Designing for Sign-Up
  This talk is for anybody who has ever had the problem of getting people to sign up for their web application. I got frustrated trying to find good resources on how to do this effectively that I decided to write it up myself.
• Managing Your Online Identity Outside the Walled Garden
  This is a copanel with fellow Newburyporter John Eckman, who knows this stuff cold. We’ll be focusing on those tools that exist outside of walled gardens that help rather than hinder you in sharing your identity.

I was also invited to speak on a panel: The Problem with Design Research with Robert Hoekman, Jr. and Jared Spool, in which we’re going to be talking about when design research actually gets in the way…but we’ll each be taking different viewpoints so as to keep it interesting.

If these talks sound interesting to you, please let the SXSW folks know by voting for them or leaving a comment, as part of the way that SXSW filters through so many submissions is by aggregating public feedback.

See you in Austin!

He makes a really good point: it’s better to have 100,000 passionate users than 1,000,000 non-passionate users. This allows you to actually sell a product to those 100,000 people and make some profit at the end of the day. If you have a ton of users, most of which aren’t passionate, then you have a much harder time actually convincing them to give you money for the thing they’re not passionate about.

However, I think Robert misses something crucial in the dichotomy he sets up between “passionate” people and “non-passionate” people. This is the same complaint that I have with Forrester’s research, that they bucket people into being either “this” or “that”…with the implicit assumption that it doesn’t change: you’re either use technology at a certain level or you don’t.

The reality is that people are passionate about some things, and not at all about others. They love some activities and don’t care about others. The activity is what they’re passionate about (not the technology) and when they’re passionate enough they’ll learn the necessary technology as they find appropriate. Passion depends upon the activity in question.

Take knitters, for example. Most knitters are non-passionate technology-wise. They are not early adopters of the latest new gadget, and they’re not scrambling to sign up for the latest social network. Some are, undoubtedly, but most aren’t. They probably don’t care about Twitter, or Friendfeed, or Seesmic.

But they’re passionate about knitting, so when ravelry.com comes along and offers a place for knitters to gather online, suddenly they start to consider actually using a social network because it might be of value to them. They sign up and suddenly appear to be one of the early-adopter passionate people that Robert talks about, when in reality they rarely do this sort of thing but, well, this is knitting and that’s what they’re passionate about.

This doesn’t mean that people using ravelry.com are suddenly early adopters of all technology. It simply means that technology came along to help them practice their passion better, and so they adopted it because the value proposition made sense to them. The way this would normally happen is if some other knitter says “hey, you should check this out”.

This happens to me all the time. I’ll talk to web designers about some new software and I’ll get really excited, talking about in-depth details of how it works. Then I’ll get into a conversation with a photographer about the latest lens they bought and my eyes will glaze over. I just want a no-brainer camera that I don’t have to think about. I’m not passionate about cameras…but I am passionate about other things.

The activity is the thing to focus on, not the technology. Technology enables the activity, and people will get excited about the technology if they’re excited about the activity first and the benefits of the technology has been explained to them. But you don’t make passionate photographers by showing them lenses, you make passionate photographers by showing them pictures that rip your heart out.

That said, I understand the point Robert is making. There are some people (early adopters) who will try out anything simply because it’s new and interesting. But those are technology early adopters…a very small population of people who get a large amount of attention because of their predilection to try new things. A much larger population (although much more fractured) are those people who are already passionate about some activity or other, and can become passionate about new technology as it relates to that activity, but they just haven’t been introduced properly.

Introducing people to a new product properly is the biggest challenge facing companies today. We all rejoiced when the Web came along because it meant that you could sell something to anybody, anywhere, and at any time. I could write my simple blog from Newburyport, MA and have readers anywhere in the world. But the reality is that everyone else can too, and with everybody trying to do the same thing at the same time the cacophony of products and pitches and blog posts is simply deafening.

In other words, the task is not always to make people passionate about something, it’s to show them how technology (or your product, etc) can make them even better at what they’re passionate about. Robert isn’t mentioning FriendFeed every 2 seconds because he’s passionate about activity streams. He’s mentioning it because he’s passionate about reading, spreading, and talking about the latest technology news. That’s the activity he cares about most, I dare say. Technology is merely the enabler of that activity.

So while yes, you should take advantage of early adopters, learning from them and focusing some of your effort on them, you can’t assume that just because people aren’t early adopters they’re not passionate. Passion is more about doing an activity well than it is about using the latest technology to do it.

John wrote a great post the other day comparing some newly released features from the travel startup Dopplr with those of another travel startup, Tripit. Both services have become very well known in the last year and are converging in the same space: they’re increasingly becoming competitors in what might be called the social travel space. I actually use both services as examples in my talks…they are both doing some very innovative design. I even put Tripit screenshots in my book on social design.

Well, someone by the name of “Thomas” left a comment on John’s post that was pretty disparaging of Dopplr. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, as every service has its detractors.

Except it appears that Thomas might actually work for Tripit. Just before he was going to publish the comment, John noticed that the machine Thomas commented from was called wall.tripitinc.com. While it is possible that this is an amazing coincidence, or that Thomas simply forgot to mention who he was, it’s unlikely. The comment is written from the voice of a customer trying out both services. (John’s post contains the full comment)

John tried to contact Thomas, but hasn’t heard back.

So, it appears that someone from Tripit is making negative comments about their competitor Dopplr without disclosing who they are. That is bad behavior, in the same way as if someone from Dopplr had come and made positive comments without disclosing who they are.

At the same time, on Twitter we were having a discussion about the Loopt debacle, in which the service sent out invitations to someone’s friends without their knowledge. We were asking…is this evil design or merely bad design?

Update: Loopt has changed their app in response to the concerns of their users. This is a great example of how to evolve products with users by listening to their feedback. Good on Loopt for acknowledging and fixing the issue.

Evil design would be when the designers intentionally deceived users by design. In other words, evil design is when designers(in this case the people making design decisions, not necessarily the coders or visual designers) know they aren’t being straight-up with users, and created the interface in order to keep it that way. There are many examples of this…one of which being the Facebook Beacon platform.

(as an aside, I’m sure I’ve made evil designs before, too…this isn’t evil as in Satan evil…it’s more like deception that creeps into an interface over time…and the designers know better but do it anyway)

Bad design would be when something unintentionally happens as a result of the design. This is very different. The designers simply didn’t know what would happen in all cases. I would suggest that most user frustration is caused by bad design…there are so many unintended consequences in the interfaces we make.

Nevertheless, I think there are a couple interesting points about the whole Slideshare affair.

1. I was genuinely frustrated at the interface. I was as frustrated as I can be with people. I assumed that the interface was designed intentionally, and that the designers had made an explicit decision to put only one link there with the hope that people would be more likely to click on it. The frustration I had grew to a feeling of being manipulated…which is an even worse feeling. These feelings, of course, were silly.
2. Most negative effects from interfaces are unintentional. The designers do not mean to frustrate you…they simply didn’t know it was happening. Always give them the benefit of the doubt. In this case, the feature is a *very* minor one, an invitation to join a group.
3. People’s actions are completely colored by their current experiences. I would never have written the same post today, after the fact. In fact, this is the post I’m writing today, after the fact. So when people complain, they’re probably only complaining because they’re still in the moment. When the moment passes, they’ll think more clearly.

Update #1: There is indeed a group on Slideshare called Presentation Design Tennis. So the following email is true…

I received an email that was supposedly from Slideshare. I don’t know if it really is from Slideshare, but it feels like a devious email either way.

Here is a screenshot:

As you can see, there is a single link in the email. It is a confirmation link, meaning that if you click on it then you are confirming your acceptance of the invitation.

The problem is, I don’t know if I want to accept the invitation yet. There is no way for me to find out more about “Presentation Design Tennis”, which sounds interesting but bears no credibility at all since I’ve never heard of it. What I really want is the ability to find out more about it. If there had been a “find out more” link, I would have clicked it.

In this case, though, the design is somewhat evil careless, in that it tempts you by telling you of an invitation (social influence) but doesn’t allow you to find out anything before you accept. (Classmates.com is currently killing the respect of their users in this same way.)

This also reminds me of the subtleness of Facebook’s Beacon platform, which was designed in a similar manner…where the default action would get you involved in something that maybe you didn’t want to be involved in.

The takeaway is that this is really about respecting users. The best experience for users in this case would be to be able to find out more at their leisure, without committing to anything they don’t want to. A good solution might be “Accept Invitation” or “Learn more” links. The “Sign Up or Learn More” patterns seems to be in wide use these days, and for good reason. Yes, you might have lower numbers of people actually doing the thing (in this case joining the group), but you’ll know that the people who did end up joining really want to be there.

This month we’re changing to a new format. So far we’ve been completely unformatted…everyone simply showing up and talking for a while. This has worked out well, but it occurred to us that most of us specialize in some topic or another. For example, we have John Eckman who specializes in open source enterprise software, Will Bond who is writing his own PHP frameworks, and Tom Summit who, as a talent recruiter looks at LinkedIn in a completely different way than I ever would. In other words, we learn a lot from each other. (And these are only three of the folks out of the 100+ or so who have attended the meetings) We’ve had SEO experts, entrepreneurs of many stripes, an IP lawyer, programmers, marketers, front-end wizards, and all sorts of folks that I honestly had no idea lived in the area.

So this week I’m going to be giving a short talk…the first of what I hope to be ongoing short talks at the meetup. I’ll start it off by giving a talk on Designing for Sign-Up, the ins and outs of getting people to sign up for your web application/software. This will be a first draft of the talk I’m giving at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in September. So I’ll get practice giving the talk, hopefully improving it by listening intently to the valuable discussion that follows. It will also be a fun way to help folks who are dealing with the problem and to have a point of discussion to go forward with.

Back in the spring I gave a short talk (along with Ethan, Dan, and Scott) at the Markup and Style Society meetup, and it went really well. Folks seemed to like the focus of discussion. At the North Shore meetup we’re going to try something similar, but have only one talk instead of 4.

Also, I wanted to give a shout out to the Build Guild, a meetup that just had their first gathering last week in Salem. It was started by two guys who had previously come to a North Shore web meetup, Marc Amos and Angelo Simeoni. I think it’s awesome to see more folks get meetups started in their towns…it sounds like they had a really good turnout. So if you live in the Salem/Peabody area and are looking for a local meetup, check it out.

For more details on Thursday’s North Shore meetup, please see one of the following places:

• North Shore Web Geeks web site
• Facebook Group (61 members and counting)
• Upcoming page: Upcoming.org Event page

See you on Thursday!

Hurry up, the customer has a complaint

By using services like Twitter and Google blogsearch, companies can quickly respond to people who vent their frustrations. In some cases, they can actually provide real customer service.

I would point out that these technologies aren’t just for finding out what’s wrong, but they can also help companies know what they’re doing right, what is resonating with their audience.

For example, in the last two weeks on my twitterstream I’ve heard probably 20-25 people say that they enjoyed the movie Wall-E. In the same time period not one person complained…that signals to me that the movie is definitely worth watching. Some people even used the term “classic”. By following real-time trends you can see what is gaining word-of-mouth and what isn’t.

I’m also happy that the article serves as a tidy follow-up to Chapter 3 in my book Designing for the Social Web, a chapter I called Authentic Conversations. When I wrote that chapter back in the winter time it wasn’t clear if the big companies (Dell, Comcast, etc) were going to come around to this approach of monitoring in real-time what their customers say…and more importantly responding and having authentic conversations. As much as I’m used to being treated poorly by big companies, I’m somewhat optimistic about the stories in this article being signs that perhaps there is real change going on.

And the article makes another point that I made in the book, which is that having authentic conversations in this way isn’t just about customer service….it’s also about innovation and product evolution…that by listening to customers over time we can actually build better products by reacting to what is happening on the ground.

In other words, we change technology by creating it, and then it changes us as we use it. And we both change in response to each other. Many times when we talk about technology we talk only as creators…should we create it…should it have been created? But by the time we have created technology it’s too late to ask that question…it’s already changed us in some way. We can’t go back, at least not this generation. Maybe the next generation will forget.

The gun-rights activists like to assume the first frame…that we are sovereign over the technology we create and it doesn’t change us. Guns don’t kill humans, humans kill humans. On CNN the other day was a photo of a protester holding up a sign: “if guns kill humans, do pencils write books?”.

But thoughtful people know it’s not that simple. Technology isn’t neutral…the mere presence of it changes our behavior. I’ve read about a study in which the mere presence of a gun in the room (a randomly placed gun…nobody mentions it during the study) made people uneasy and tense. The people in the study thought they were there for something else…but of course everyone notices the gun and it has a direct affect on their behavior. They act more hostile, more angry. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. When you have a gun everything looks like a target.

Of course, if guns didn’t kill people our army wouldn’t need them to kill people.

Ahh!!!…there’s the key. Guns make it easier to kill people…they enable a behavior, and by enabling the behavior, by making it easier to do, it is done more often. And as guns get easier to use and more deadly, they make it even easier. This is the grey area…the area that people who see the world in black and white can’t see…

Anyway, this piece wasn’t supposed to be about guns. It was supposed to be about technology. Lately I’ve been using several tools that enable me to perform actions easier, and as those actions become easier it changes the way I work. So while they don’t do anything new, per se, the fact that they make an activity so easy and fast changes the way I do the activity. I think this is a sign of me co-evolving with the technology I use.

Here are a few:

• Wordpress when I installed Wordpress many years ago the ease of publishing allowed me to publish more. Tumblr is another recent tool that makes it even easier to post.
• Skitch Skitch is a screen-capture program that makes it incredibly easy to grab screenshots, annotate them, and throw them up on the web. Because it allows uploading in one-click, I’m now using my Flickr account to store screen grabs that I think are interesting.
• LaterLoop I’ve just begun using LaterLoop, but it’s a great way to save things you want to read later…to “loop back on”. This happens to me a lot, when I have 80 tabs open and simply want to remember them, but don’t necessarily want to bookmark them permanently (although it does that too)
• Time Machine Time Machine is the backup program in Apple’s latest OS Leopard. It makes backups super easy to do, which results in the happy outcome that you backup more often. The addition of a wireless base station (which I don’t have) will make this even easier.

It’s interesting to note that these technologies are late-comers by a long-shot. Many, many solutions had already existed in the marketplace supporting the exact same activities for a long time before they showed up. But this software is designed so smoothly that it actually pushes the state-of-the-art forward…changing the way we do those activities.

That seems to me to be the hallmark of good design…when the person and the technology co-evolve…changing each other as time goes on.

Here’s a 2003 email from Bill Gates in which he vents his frustration with the Windows interface…in quite excruciating detail.

Epic Bill Gates email rant

Throughout the email Gates continually voices his frustration in trying to perform what he thinks should be straightforward tasks.

My favorite bit:

“This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.”

Lesson: No matter how expert you are…you still appreciate clear instructions. Nobody, not even Bill Gates, likes feeling they have no clue.