When do you have too much information?
Modern organizations have armies of people trained in producing and publishing information, but there is a huge and growing lack of people who are skilled at organizing, analyzing and prioritizing it.
The Christmas 2009 airline-bombing attempt in the USA showed what can happen when there is too much information and too little skilled analysis. “It’s […]
IKEA chooses an ugly font
IKEA changes its font to Verdana. This is not likely to result in a massive drop in sales.
“Verdana was designed for the limitations of the Web — it’s dumbed down and overused,” Carolyn Fraser, a letterpress printer in Melbourne, Australia, told TIME. The design community is seemingly up in arms that IKEA would choose […]
When online is better than face-to-face
There is an assumption that a face-to-face interaction delivers a better result than a ‘cold’ online interaction. But that is not always the case.
Last month, I needed to change a number of flights at very short notice. A relation had died and I needed to get home. I was in the top tier of my […]
Adding features adds complexity
Many website managers fail to recognize that any addition to the website adds complexity, which may result in confused and lost customers.
The man stood looking at the woman who sat looking back at him through the glass.
“Press the # key,” she said, the slightest air of impatience in her voice. The man looked at her […]
The complexity tax
The complexity tax is demanded by those who want to create dependency.
I was reading recently about a country that had “pervasive corruption and bureaucracy”, and how this made it very complicated to do business. It reminded me about the book, The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando De Soto, in which he showed that the poorer […]
Information is causing global warming
An information tsunami is sweeping the world, eating up vast quantities of time and energy.
“The information avalanche coming from all sides — the Internet, PDAs, hundreds of television channels — is burying us in extraneous data that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad audience,” writes Dusty Horwitt in The Washington Post in […]
Low value content is destroying your website
Low-value content is destroying the usefulness of intranets and public websites. It needs to be stored separately.
Andrew Leung is a computer science researcher at the University of California. His team analyzed a large data/content environment over a three month period. Their findings included the following:
More than 90 percent of the files were never accessed.
Of those […]
Why does the OK button say OK?
Words are critical to task completion on websites and in applications. Yet they are still chosen carelessly.
“Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button?” Jakob Nielsen asked in his excellent Alertbox in May 2008. I have two questions here: Why do we need a Cancel button in most situations? Why is the […]
Great websites do, not say
Never tell people what you’re going to do for them on the Web. Just let them do what they came to do as quickly and simply as possible.
“Welcome to our website.” What? I’m in a hurry. I don’t want to pass meaningless pleasantries with your website. I don’t want to shake its hand. Or talk […]
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 […]
