Six out of ten times that I'm forced to view an "iPhone-optimized" version of a site on my iPhone, I regret it, and desperately wish there were a "pretend I'm not safari" button!

I forget where I read it, but Steve Jobs said something to the effect of, "The mobile web sucks, and will always suck." And that's why mobile Safari was designed, from the get go, to render web pages just like on the desktop.

Saw this nicely designed bike rack tonight at the local Walmart. Do you notice the (intentional or not) "W"?

I was surprised to see such a neat looking thing at Walmart. Maybe it's part of a larger brand revitalization that's supposed to come along with the logo change.

Source for logos: Brand New

One of my favorite movements going on right now is the Slow Movement. What this proposes is to focus on gradual, meaningful changes, rather than quick rises.

I especially like the implications for design. Do you keep introducing new features so as to attract new users, or do you try to keep existing users happy by staying familiar, and only making incremental, but meaningful changes when absolutely necessary.

What if Facebook hadn't implemented the Applications feature? My gut tells me their userbase would be the same, if not larger. Certainly people were turned off by the Applications feature. Was anybody turned on? I'm still with facebook, but it feels "messy" to me now, and so I don't check it as much as I used to. All the doo-dads seem to interfere with the core use-case, which is checking out other people.

Twitter seems like the opposite. They've been very slow to change their system. I've been using it for a year and haven't noticed a substantial, new feature or re-design. Oftentimes I get frustrated, "Why haven't they improved this g-d thing yet!??" All sorts sorts of questions seem to crop up. Have they run out of funding? Are they just trying to focus on scaling the servers? Do they not care about improving the design?

Or is it intentional? If you look at the space of Twitter apps, there are so many good features that would seem very tempting, as a product manager, to slap onto Twitter. But by not doing anything, what happens is users adapt. They become creative. They write 3rd-party tools.

Right now, Twitter is very simple. An almost "Google" of social networking services. Just one box, a few buttons, go.

I had 25 unread items in my Google Reader, and I was about to click "Mark All As Read," when I noticed myself zooming in on one item. It was a post on Brand New, a blog that does before-and-after analysis of logos. Noticing my behavior made me realize that Brand New is one of the blogosphere's best kept secrets.

One of their best articles is their Best & Worst of 2008 roundup.

It's really cool to see how logos evolve. I think it's the same feeling I get when I see the evolution of Homer Simpson:

Often companies keep their logo design changes quiet, so as not to disrupt their brand value. Brand New, therefore, sort of has a constant "gotcha moment" for style. It's like how we never really imagine current fashion as on-the-way-to-retro. For example, wearing bell bottoms in the 70s and 80s just looked "good" at the time, while as now it's associated with a certain attitude, like blaxploitation funk. Likewise, 10 years from now our logosphere will be substantially different, and yet we won't have noticed the change.

Someone once said that architecture is the most important art form, because we experience it everyday. But I wonder if nowadays, it's logos. I wonder if the average person knows more logos than words. (Here's a fun link to a guess-that-logo game).

(Cross-posted on Drunk Log, where you can see keystrokes it took to make this post)

Part of the allure of Web 2.0 principles is that they suggest counter-intuitive responses to business decisions. One of the 2.0 principles is about enabling shareability, even at a cost. YouTube, for example, made a move that was bold at the time. What YouTube did was let anybody embed their videos anywhere. And YouTube went further than simply permitting this. They encouraged it! They provided the HTML code to embed videos on every YouTube page. At the time, this idea would have been a tough sell. The argument is that you don't want users leeching your service without giving anything back. But by doing this, though, YouTube became the primary way that MySpace kiddies started sharing videos with each other. And through the power of viral marketing, YouTube's traffic exploded.

The way I perceive products, I always look for clues into the mindset of the creators. Part of the enjoyment from using Apple's products is imagining how hard-of-a-sell some of their unique features would be anywhere else. For example, if you were an idealistic product manager at almost any other software company, and you wanted to really perfect the user experience, you'd have a mutiny among your developers and the producers would be breathing down your neck.

Likewise, Google is a fascinating company to watch. You can see so many places where every other company would have bowed to compromise or inappropriate pressure from the wrong departments. When I was working at Google, for example, I overheard that one person has the role of defending the simplicity of the home page. Her job is to resist pressure to turn Google into a Yahoo!-style portal. I'm sure that every day, someone begs her, "come on, this will get us more exposure for our products & services, which means more money, which means you'll get a raise!" And she just has to say, a thousand times a year, "No."

There's a technical feature about Google's search results that is an imperfect application of 2.0 principles. There are three methods to providing links in search results:

Just share the link

In this case, you provide search results as follows:

<a href="http://www.searchresult.com/">search result</a>

This is probably how you would first make a search engine. This is nice for users, because if instead of visiting the link, they want to share the link, they can just right-click on the it, choose "Copy Link Location," and then paste it in an e-mail or an instant message. This is what Google does if you're not signed in. This, to me, would be the most pure application of Web 2.0 principles.

Wrap the link with tracking URLs

In this method, you embed the actual link into a link to an intermediary service that tracks what users are clicking on. So for example, this is what Google links to if you're signed in:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Freader&ei=s-dsScLBB4is8gTNtZCkDA&usg=AFQjCNHkwXX7q8y0uRXShFxrBJdJ5oJt3Q&sig2=5KBTga4hto8b4cZyfvuJhw

By tracking what people click, you can improve search results. Oddly enough, this isn't exactly what Google does, because they want to keep their search results untainted by fake clicks. The putative reasoning, I've heard, is that if you're signed in, Google will customize search results for you. But I've never noticed or heard of this actually happening. Which makes me wonder if Google simply tracks this data because they might want to do something with it. Which also, then, suggests a meeting at Google where someone simply pushed hard, "this information is so valuable to us, blah blah, we're using it for stealth project x, we can't get rid of the feature, people hardly complain about it."

There are downsides, though. First of all, it discourages sharing the links because it word-wraps in an e-mail and takes up too much space in an instant message. It also just looks bad. Second, there may be invasion-of-privacy issues. And third, it does slow down visiting the site. It takes two hops, instead of one, to get to your destination. Google may argue that they have nearly 100% uptime, and that the forwarding service is nearly instant, but the experience is still imperfect.

Those last two problems aren't necessarily related to accepted 2.0 principles, but they do violate the spirit of Web 2.0: err on the side of helping users out. It's a very "Don't be evil" approach.

Wrap with a tracking URL, but fool the user

This method, which Google doesn't use, makes users believe that the link they're clicking on goes directly to the next site. With JavaScript, shady search engines will make it appear, in your status bar, that you are getting a full URL:

<a onMouseOver="window.status='fakeURL'">realURL</a>

This would violate the spirit of Web 2.0 by not being transparent enough.

Now, when I initially wrote this article, I didn't survey any other search engines. I honestly expected that going to live.com, Microsoft's search engine, would show them tricking users. But even if you're signed in, Microsoft will use the first method. Which sort of makes sense, since I heard that the live.com group is supposed to be one of Microsoft's A-teams.

(Cross-posted on Drunk Log, which plays back the keystrokes that wrote this article)

.. the distance between the surface of the phone and the pixels that represent the GUI. The key in any user interface is the melding between human body and machine. The primary concern, and this has been reiterated elsewhere, is that you touch the iPhone, but it doesn't touch you back. There's no tactile feedback. And that's a serious, potentially fatal issue. I had a heat-sensitive touch-pad keyboard, and I eventually ditched it because you'd only hit keys correctly 99.5% of the time. That seems like a successful hit ratio, but it's that .5% that messes everything up. It made me have to look at the keyboard too much. It interrupted my flow of typing. Ultimately, it reduced my wpm on a Dvorak layout to the same speed as QWERTY.

Not all touch-screens are bad. The Nintendo DS is a fair example. It uses a pen mostly, which gives you good precision. Plus, the screen is so small that there isn't much deviation between where you touch and what the device registers. While as on my tablet PC, a couple of milimeters of deviation between the pen and the input creates a system that is a complete failure. I think this is because the screen is too thick, and so even with slight changes in viewing angle, you never can get the tip of your pen to line up right with the cursor. Even when you try to run the calibration programs where they ask you to touch various corners of the screen, it can never feel as precise as pencil and paper. And so you just ditch it and resort back to the keyboard and mouse.

Nuanced poor designs - The best way to learn is from mistakes--just hopefully they are the mistakes of others