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Misconceptions have many forms. Maybe you believe that if you just eat lowfat or fatfree food, you won’t put on weight. Or maybe you can never trust people who offer to help you. Or maybe you believe that you have to make it harder for yourself than necessary, to prove your worth.

Whatever they are, we probably all have a few of those going on. The thing about misconceptions is, you’re rarely aware of them. But if you ever stop to listen to that voice, and figure out what’s...

Do me a favor and pay a visit to the web site for the <a href=”http://www.dk-designskole.dk/”>Design School in Copenhagen, Denmark. You probably won’t understand the words, but you’ll still get my point. It looks great, but it doesn’t help you get your job done.

A few examples: You have to click through a splash screen to get to the meat. The navigation is visual only: You have to either decipher or remember what those little icons mean. You can’t...

Say you wanted to open up a stock photography business. You have thousands of photos that your customers can search and browse, until they find and buy the one that’s just right for them.

What medium would you choose for your catalog? Would you print books? No. They’re expensive to print and ship, and don’t have very good search tools. Would you open up a physical store and display them in the window, like real estate brokers? Narh, much too expensive to have all those...

I’ve spent too much time developing web applications recently, and getting fed up with the constraints of designing user interfaces on the web. Try imagining having to write Microsoft Excel for the web to run in Netscape, not using Java, and you’ll know what I mean.

So in order to compensate, I’ve been toying with some Windows application development, just for fun. And it struck me how Microsoft have always been really, really good at writing complete, solid UI widgets....

Which would you prefer to write a letter to your grandma: A word processor, such as Microsoft Word, or a text entry widget in a browser? Or which would you prefer to read your email: Microsoft Outlook or web-based Yahoo! Mail?

There’s no denying it. Despite the many advantages of web-based user interfaces, or WUIs for short, they’re generally a major step back from the desktop application GUIs (graphical user interfaces) that came before.

It’s not that the...

You can always tell an out-of-towner in New York’s subway. He’s the person that has to swipe his card five or six times through the turnstile, jamming the whole weight of his body against the immovable bar, until it finally works.

Real New Yorkers take pride in operating the turnstile as smoothly as possible. They learn through bitter experience at exactly what pace the card must be swiped, and manage to do the walk-up-swipe-and-walk-through maneuver in one smooth, yoga-esque...

Has control of the desktop, including the browser. Extending this to other devices, such as palms (pocket pc), cell phones, and gaming boxes (xbox).

Expanding on the server side, with features that make software running on MS servers (dot-net) better able to exploit the MS clients (Dot-Net UI stuff).

Expanding this into services, such as Hailstorm, that they can charge for.

Accept Contributions Up Front

A lot of users turn away when they see a login or registration screen. On my site, the number of is around 94%. Part of the reason is probably that people are just tired of going through registration forms, and they don’t bother when the benefits of doing so is dubious. Part of it, most likely, is that they’re wary of handing out their email address, because they’re more scared of spam email than they are of junk mail, even though the time and...

I recently handed over my car to a valet parking at Venice beach in Los Angeles. Just before I let go of the key, I noticed a sign saying

This contract limits our liability. Read it.

The intention was clear: By handing over my keys, I was implicitly agreeing to the contract. The contract was printed with small type, on a poster, sitting in floor height. So in order to know what I was agreeing to, I’d have to get down on my knees, take out my glasses, and spend ten minutes reading it....

Looks Are Deceptive

When I bought my last car, I thought it looked slick, fresh, cool. But then, a couple months later, a friend of mine bought a new car that looked even slicker, fresher, cooler. I could never look at mine with the same eyes again. It didn’t have the same freshness anymore. I have to get a new one, now!

What does this have to do with software? Well, software’s got to look fresh, too. You may think that you buy software on pure rational merits, but often, the...