Matt Simmons wrote a great post on designing elegant solutions for when users inevitably make mistakes on your system. In Engineering Infrastructures For Humans he uses the example of ash trays in airplanes to make his main point:

You don’t engineer your systems with the belief that none of your computers will ever break. That’s insane; you KNOW they’re going to break. So don’t assume that your users will never break the rules. Build in graceful failure as often as possible, whether you’re designing a user interface or a security policy.

The ash tray story is really interesting, so be sure to click through to his post.

South African bank Absa just rolled out their new online banking portal. There are two things about this launch that raise red flags for me. First, from ABSA rolls out new Internet Banking revision:

This launch follows a successful trial with the bank’s 36 000 employees over the past few months. The trial allowed the project team to identify and solve any defects and gauge the response from users, via over 1 300 feedback emails received from employees.

It’s shocking that we still have to talk about this, but let’s just state it again, as clearly as possible: You are not the user. You cannot test a system on employees — who know all the intricacies inside and out — and think that you’ve done appropriate user testing. There are plenty of solid arguments and evidence for this, but for now I’ll just quote Jakob Nielsen:

One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that “you are not the user.” If you work on a development project, you’re atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders. The antidote to bubble vapor is user testing: find out what representative users need. It’s tempting to work on what’s hot, but to make money, focus on the basics that customers value.

Also see Myth #14: You are like your users and You are not your user, which both have a lot of great points and research around this.

Second, there’s this quote from the Head of Retail Markets at ABSA:

The development of Absa Online saw up to 140 individuals, working across three continents, putting in an astonishing 450 000 man-hours of development work. Four million lines of code were written in this, a “first-of-its-kind” technology deployment in South Africa.

Well, that is just silliness. As one of the commenters on the article points out, it’s Bill Gates of all people who said, “Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs.”

The size of the project, how long it took, and how many people worked on it is completely immaterial. What matters is if the thing works well to help real users accomplish their goals. I really hope it does, because this looks like an outrageously expensive project. Hopefully it doesn’t become South Africa’s version of the Four Seasons $18m redesign.

Michael Wolff shares a brutal, apocolyptic view on Facebook in the MIT Technology Review. From The Facebook Fallacy:

I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.

Facebook, however, has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn’t advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits.

You may not agree with Wolff’s conclusions, but the article is worth reading — if for not other reason than to see an extreme argument delivered with relentlessly articulate conviction.

I’ll probably never get tired of articles about Comic Sans. And as far as they go, Jenny Ambrose’s What’s the Deal with Comic Sans? is a pretty good one. Here is Comic Sans designer Vincent Connare in his own words:

There was no intention to include the font in other applications other than those designed for children. The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.

I love the irony of this. As Ambrose points out:

Here we are in 2012, discussing the usage appropriateness of a typeface created in 1994, which was in turn created in response to that very same typography appropriateness problem.

And round and round we go. Also see my small contribution to this debate.

I’m a big fan of Stephen Few and his approach to data visualization. His book Show Me The Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten has been immensely helpful in my work as a user researcher, and I’ve been lucky enough to attend one of his excellent seminars. So I’ve been really interested to hear his viewpoint on the latest Infographic craze that’s taking the pageview world by storm.

I am personally not a fan of the Infographics that are passed around on Twitter every day. Most of them are confusing and only meant to drive eye candy-derived traffic with no intention to communicate data clearly. I think we pretty much hit rock bottom with this Mashable monstrosity called “The Internet Is Ruining Your Brain”. For some fun reading, also see Dan Frommer’s How Infographics Are Ruining The Web, and Megan McArdle’s Ending the Infographic Plague.

But now, Stephen finally weighed in on his blog with a very sensible argument about the nature of data visualization, and where common web infographics fit into that universe. He starts his article Data Art vs. Data Visualization by making an important distinction:

There are as many definitions of data visualization as there are definers, but at the root of this term that has been around for many years is the goal that data be visualized in a way that leads to understanding. Whatever else it does, it must inform. If we accept this as fundamental to the definition of data visualization, we can judge the merits of any example above all else on how clearly, thoroughly, and accurately it enlightens.

By data art, I’m referring to visualizations of data that seek primarily to entertain or produce an aesthetic experience. It is art that is based on data. As such, we can judge its merits as we do art in general.

He goes on to give three reasons why it’s harmful when data art masquerades as data visualization.

Chris Dixon in The default state of a startup is failure — a short, powerful post on human behavior and entrepreneurship:

If you are starting a company and wondering why nothing good seems to happen unless you force it to happen, that’s because the world wants to stay the way it is. Customers, partners, and most of all incumbents don’t want to think hard, try new things, or change in any way. The world is lazy and just wants to keep doing what it’s doing.

He points out that because the world is lazy, no one will care about a new product you launch unless you make them.

Jim Dalrymple in Blogging is not a thing, it’s an attitude:

Readers connect with a blogger. They know things about them, they laugh together and sometimes argue over points in a story. It’s a give and take relationship that not everyone can handle.

Blogging is not about being stiff and rigid in your writing, but being flexible and flowing with ideas. It doesn’t matter if everyone agrees with your thoughts. In fact, that would be really boring “” but you write it anyway.

I completely agree with Jim, and it’s one of the main things I’ve learned in the few months that I’ve been writing more on this site. Conventional blogging wisdom says that you have to pick a topic and stick with it. I read this advice all over the web, so I used to think about it all the time. I worried about the topics I covered, and whether or not I’m “allowed” to publish something if it doesn’t quite fit my One Chosen Topic. Oh, and I worried a great deal about what that One Chosen Topic should be. Writing lost its fun and became stressful.

I no longer believe that this conventional wisdom is true. I think that people follow blogs primarily because they connect with the authors and their views in some way, not because of the specific topics they cover (although of course that does play a part). It’s why I keep coming back to The Loop, Daring Fireball, The Brooks Review, Shawn Blanc, etc. It’s why I don’t mind when Marco Arment reviews LED light bulbs.

I might not always agree with these authors, but I have a genuine affinity for them, and I respect their views. They’re not faceless organizations, but human beings that write about things that interest them. And because they do it well, they get me interested in a much more diverse set of topics (like baseball). They prompt me to think more critically, and that spurs additional thoughts that feed into my own writing.

I also like this quote from Michael Lopp from his article Please Learn to Write:

Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back – failure is a lonely silence.

I think when it comes down to it, it’s the constant fear of the lonely silence that drives us to become better writers. But that’s a much better fear to have than wondering about what you’re allowed to put on your site. I’m in no position to give writing advice, but I’ll tell you what has made my experience worthwhile.

I feel like writing more has helped me find my voice. And I am becoming more comfortable with raising that voice about a continuously expanding range of topics. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not so good. But there has been a big pay-off in persisting: a small, growing community of readers that I appreciate and enjoy immensely. They tell me when I’m full of crap, and they tell me when I write something they like. That’s an incredible privilege, and why I love the blog format so much. So if you’re one of those who keep coming back and provide the occasional piece of feedback: thank you.

Ok, this turned out much longer than I planned. I actually just wanted to send you to Jim’s post. So don’t forget to go read it.

A couple of weeks ago I read this quote by John Cage in The Art of Looking Sideways:

I have nothing to say and I’m saying it. Is your mind racing about all the ways that statement applies to life on the Internet? Yeah, me too. In fact, the phrase immediately made me think of a joke I could make on Twitter, which I wrote down right away. But I wanted to get my facts right, so I started reading up on John Cage – as you do when you’re on vacation. This is where I ask you to please stick with me as we go on a brief detour about the nature of criticism.

My rabbit-hole journey into the world of John Cage led me to a great 2004 essay by Joe Dacey called John Cage Defined in the 1950s. It outlines how the phrase “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it” comes from his “Lecture on Nothing”:

In this lecture, he outright tells the listener that the lecture has no point and will go nowhere, “I am here and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment”. He implores the audience to enjoy each and every moment of the lecture even though he admits that it is pointless. He advocates that, “Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus need not fear its loss” and “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else”.

It’s not just you – that is a weird thing to do. What fascinates me most about Cage is that he never bothered to reflect on any criticism of his work. Ever.

Cage mostly ignored criticism he received believing that most people didn’t understand why he composed the music he composed. In fact, he saw society as “one of the greatest impediments an artist can possibly have” to creating good art. After receiving a review for a concert he gave in Seattle that stated the performance was “ridiculous,” Cage’s responded that he had no interest in the review because he “knew perfectly well it wasn’t.”

Knowing when to ignore criticism and when to listen to it is one of the hardest skills to learn, and so easy to get wrong. On the one extreme is the John Cage approach, where you view all criticism as bogus or not worthy of your attention. On the other extreme there are people (and companies) who change course with every little piece of feedback they get, regardless of its merit.

But somewhere in between is a happy medium where you use criticism as a springboard to ask yourself tough questions. If you’re a designer, those questions might be things like, “Why did I put this button here?” or “Why might someone find this interface confusing?”. Those are excellent questions to ask yourself. If you can answer them, and defend the decisions you made, you can move on to the next thing. If your questions lead you to make some changes, well, that’s great too because your end result is going to be a better product.

I like the way The 99 Percent approaches the process of finding this middle ground in their article On Criticism, Cynicism & Sharpening Your Gut Instinct:

Criticism is doubt informed by curiosity and a deep knowledge of a discipline related to your work. Whether the criticism you receive is constructive or not, it comes from knowledge. Informed insights like “I’m not sure someone would ever pay that much” or “you may not want to outsource that given the high-touch required” may cause you to question your approach.

By contrast, cynicism is a form of doubt resulting from ignorance and antiquated ways. Industry experts will often express doubt based on an ingrained muscle memory of past experiences that handicaps their vision for the future. Cynical statements like, “People will never read a book on a computer” or “Why would anyone want to put their rolodex online?” are famous doubts expressed by experts with handicapped vision.

Their advice is simple: Savor criticism, shun cynicism. That seems like a sound approach to me.

Anyway, I mention all of this to ensure you of the accuracy of the joke I ended up making:

“I have nothing to say and I am saying it” – John Cage in his 1949 lecture on posting Foursquare check-ins to Twitter

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) May 14, 2012

You are, of course, welcome to disagree and send me your criticism.