syrinx

There's no success like failure, and failure is no success at all - Bob Dylan. One of a famous usability guru's recent postings was on Information architecture mistakes. Another list of top 10. How do you keep criticizing folks and still stay in business?
My take:
1. Don't have a theory, just report data to your clients.
2. Don't bite the hand that feeds you - blame the users for being ruthless.
3. Claim that things are getting better, as if market forces (the usable survive) were based on application of your design advice.
4. Since no theory means you can't prevent problems, you are guaranteed new problems so that your paying clients continue to need your services.
5. Clients would feel short-changed with a few simple principles, so be sure to provide at least 10 top problems in every list.
for example:

Other Top-10 Lists
Most of the following top-ten lists are still highly relevant for today's websites. Even as we get new mistakes, the old ones don't go away, though (happily) they do become less common.

* The ten very worst design mistakes of all time
Summary based on the main elements of the other lists.
* High-Profit Redesign Priorities
* Usability in the Movies — Top 10 Bloopers
* Most violated homepage guidelines
* Top homepage usability guidelines
* Good deeds in Web design
* Web design mistakes (2005)
* Web design mistakes (2003)
* Web design mistakes (2002)
With cartoons.
* Web design mistakes (1999)
* Web design mistakes (1996)
My first list. Luckily, many of these mistakes have been fixed by now.

tags: humor usability

posted solely for educational purposes.
Notes on the icons:

• The female and male icons are indicated by conventions of dress and hair style that are highly cultural specific.
• The convention of designating toilet facilities by gender is cultural specific. It would be more efficient to provide private stalls regardless of gender.
• The conflation of sex and excretory processes within cultures could fill a library and we won't take that tangent.
• Certainly the mouse hole is understood as not indicating a toilet facility, is not gender specific, and is not like the other two, more familiar icons above it.
• One does not expect to see an icon for a mouse in juxtaposition with the more familiar icons in this cultural context
• The brain is startled with the sudden incongruity and disruption in an established pattern and struggles to resolve the meaning of the new situation.
• An analysis reveals that this is an intentional placement of pictorial sign symbols in an arrangement designed to meet the requirements of a cartoon, i.e. a joke.
• Analysis complete, the brain determines a response level appropriate to the amount of surprise, confusion, stress, etc., that has been caused and relieved by determination that this is an a version of the template established during infancy when one's caretaker would attack one with tickling.

Okay...
I wonder if Non Sequitar is funny today...

tags: humor iconographics analysis

to health in a handbasket as yet another study indicates that humor and laughter are good medicine.

"The best clinicians understand that there is an intrinsic physiological intervention brought about by positive emotions such as mirthful laughter, optimism and hope," said study leader Lee Berk of Loma Linda University. And other research has found that humor makes us more hopeful.

another reason why depressives use humor to keep alive, no matter how much life sucks. ;-)

tags: humor medicine laughter

or "furry leash" as the video title goes, a groaner of a pun, hased on the musical accompaniment, actually a double-enpundre, since there's also Bruce Lee's (?) martial arts "Fury Unleashed" flick and that genre to be alluded to, or is that a triple pun?

tags: dogs humor music punditry

as told in videos - Robert DeNiro, Jesus Christ, and ... a horse?

tags: humor