The Design of Everyday Things I'm embarrassed it's taken me this long to (a) start reading this book and (b) finish it. It's been on my radar for several years and it was only earlier this year that I got off my butt to read it. Once I started it, it would continually get pushed to the back burner by work or other reading (fiction, mostly,) so it took something like four months to work through. In hindsight this is the sort of book I should have just locked myself in a room for a weekend to read maybe a decade ago. It's really that good, especially since I'm supposed to help advocate for the user as part of my day-to-day existence. The book is basic, but still iinsightful and helps to clarifies many concepts that float around in the world of usable design but might not be fully understood, even by people bandying the concepts around. Want to know what the jackass down the hall is really taking about when he vaguely goes on about "affordances?" This book is for you

Highly recommended.

Instead, aim to make the first visit as good as it can be, so that there will actually be a second visit or page view.

I'll explain why I've decided to write the above (a concept I try to live by) down- One common refrain of proponents of larger JavaScript libraries is that "once the library is in cache, it doesn't matter how big the download is." I have a problem with that on two levels:
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" I want to know if it's possible to use my Treo 700p in England.

There's a lot of information about this subject on your site, but it's all defined in phone jargon, not based on the actual device I have. I know that you guys internally think about dual band and quad band and all that crap, but customers think about "my phone." I want to know what MY PHONE can do without learning the specialized taxonomy of cell phones and my phone's place in that taxonomy. You know what phone I have from my account, why can't I get information on topics like this tailored to my phone?"

Seriously, I browsed their site for 20 minutes and I realized I need to instantly become a subject matter expert on cell phones before I could confidently understand whether or not my phone would work in England. There's absolutely no information tailored to me or to my device and there's no way to cross reference the information about bands and all that crap with the actual device I have. At the very minimum, I'd love to see something like this:

• Q: What City/Country Are You Traveling To
• Q: What device do you use?
• A: Your phone can/cannot be used in City/Country. You will be charged $x.xx per minute. Please call XXX-XXX-XXXX to start your plan

What I'd really like to see is a link from my account- "traveling internationally?" Which would lead me to the City/Country question and then right to the answer with a link to activate my plan. They have all the information about me from my account, I should be able to just enter my City/Country and go.

Companies often fall into the trap of organizing their websites with internal structure or labeling their websites with internal nomenclature. Companies spend a lot of time on internal hierarchies, vocabulary and organization and become so enamored/used to their own work that they assume that they can just continue to use that hierarchy on their web properties and their users will immediately see the perfection of their abstract model. In fact, internal language and organization, while possibly fine for internal consumption, are rife with specialized language, acronyms and structures that only make sense in the context of an organization. This has been long recognized as an issue. Jakob Nielsen neatly summed it up nearly ten ago (from Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management)
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(What a terribly "bloggy" thing to do. I'm down to do bloggy things from time to time, so there you have it.)
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