The best websites are useful and ugly
Functionality and usefulness are far more important to the success of your website than how nice and elegant it looks.
The first time I saw the Grand Canyon was a truly memorable experience. The depth, distance and hazy rainbow of colors were like nothing I had ever seen before. The great Colorado River looked shoe-lace-wide down […]
Web design is the design of words
In the design of physical products, the use of words is often seen as a sign of a flaw of the design. On the contrary, in web design, without words, there is no design.
“If a design depends upon labels [words], it may be faulty,” Donald Norman writes in his book, The Design of Everyday Things. […]
The economics of classification
Everything that is added to a classification subtracts from what is already there, prompting the question: Has more been added than subtracted?
I use a survey service called SurveyMonkey a lot. It’s a great service. Recently, they upgraded, adding lots of new features. The problem is that some of the older features that I regularly use […]
Why was the milk kept at the back of the supermarket?
Supermarkets are 77 years old in August and they have learned many lessons in self-service that can be applied to websites. Getting a litre of milk must be amongst the top tasks of customers going to a supermarket yet traditionally milk was always at the back of the store. Old style grocery marketing suggested you […]
