John Moltz is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers with his very nice web site. And he just wrote a thing about Windows 8 for Macworld where he really outdid himself. It’s hard to pick just one section to quote, so please, just go read Coming Attractions: Windows 8. A small taste:

Microsoft has declared Windows 8 a tablet operating system “without compromises” because it runs on tablets and desktops and toaster-fridges and can run desktop applications on any Intel-based hardware. Surely any operating system that has a matrix to let you know what features are available in which version can’t be compromised, right?

But running Windows 8, it often seems that what’s been compromised is your sanity.

I have such a weakness for snarky tech reporting.

(via The Loop)

Seth Godin sums up the dilemma of the digital age quite nicely in Dancing on the edge of finished:

Facing a sea of infinity, it’s easy to despair, sure that you will never reach dry land, never have the sense of accomplishment of saying, “I’m done.” At the same time, to be finished, done, complete—this is a bit like being dead. The silence and the feeling that maybe that’s all.

Happy weekend, everybody!

I was encouraged to read these words by Matt Mullenweg in his post Radically Simplified WordPress:

As John Borthwick put beautifully today, “A tablet is an incredible device that you can put in front of babies or 95-year-olds and they know how to use it.” How we democratize publishing on that sort of platform will not and should not work like WordPress’ current dashboard does. It’s not a matter of a responsive stylesheet or incremental UX improvements, it’s re-imagining and radically simplifying what we currently do, thinking outside the box of wp-admin.

This is great news, and I’d like to offer my 2 cents on what an ideal mobile WordPress platform might look like. Because despite several attempts I haven’t been able to figure out a good workflow for publishing to WordPress from my iPhone or iPad.

Let’s take this post as an example. I read Matt’s article in Instapaper. I used the awesome “Create Note in Simplenote” feature to send the above quote to my preferred writing app. I am writing these words in Simplenote for iOS using Markdown. Writing down the words is a breeze; geting those words to my blog is a mission (and usually results in a big time delay). I’m going to wait until I get home, open my laptop, and wait for nvALT to sync with the text I entered into Simplenote. Then I’ll copy the Markdown into MarsEdit, add some URL and keyword specifics, and hit Publish.

The WordPress iOS apps are not helpful to me, because they don’t allow you to add custom fields and URLs. For example, for link posts I have a custom field that turns the title of the RSS entry for that post into a link that takes the reader directly to the original article. I can’t do that in the iOS app.

But here’s the thing – I don’t want a better WordPress iOS app. I don’t even want a mobile-optimized WordPress Dashboard. Instead, I want all the apps I already use to integrate seamlessly with the WordPress backend. So my ideal mobile WordPress experience is this: make it dead easy for text editor apps to publish to WordPress.

Once I’m done writing this post in Simplenote I would like to tap a link that says “Publish to WordPress.” I would then like to see a customizable dialog that lets me add/edit all the fields I have chosen to include, hit Post, and be done. It could work similar to Tumblr integration on Instapaper, except with customizable fields:

Maybe this is already what the WordPress team is thinking about – I certainly hope so. Either way, I know that this kind of seamless integration would truly free us to publish from anywhere, and will put a final nail in the coffin of the “iPad is only for consuming” argument.

It would be great to get more insight from the WordPress team on what they’re working on for mobile.

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.